Song Analysis - My Mama Said

 If I could describe this song in two words, it would probably be over-dramatic parent.  

I've never fully understood why Mama in this song is so dramatic for no reason.  Like, because her daughter is dating Fred without her parents' permission, Mama's first reaction is "I suppose you’d rather see me dead."  Like why???  What's the connection?????

Anyways, this song is a story about a girl who wants to have freedom from her parents "control" to see a boy named Fred whom her parents really dislike, specifically her mother.  And her mother isn't really making it easy to come to a mutual understanding.  Everything the girl wants to do, Mama tells her no or tells her to do something else.  In the first line of the song, our main character tries to sneak out of the house, and Mama catches her and is like "no, clean your room instead."  And then in the next verse, Mama tells her, "pa and me, we give you room and bread", but Mama, that's literally your job as parent.

I don't think this song is in anyway trying to say there's a good guy or a bad guy to this song.  As the song is written from the daughter's perspective, of course the mother being overly controlling and specifically cautious about Fred makes the daughter disdain her.  But Mama is allowed to be concerned, especially if there truly is something about Fred that gives her reason to be cautious.  But then also Mama is being a little unreasonable as well.  But that's life.  There are going to be disagreements and misunderstandings, but hopefully in the end everything will work out alright.  

We don't really know much about the characters in the song, or anything about what happened next, but that's the beauty of a song.  This song manages to capture the emotions and feelings of that moment of being a lovestruck teenager who thinks she's totally in love and can't live without her boyfriend, but her parents really disapprove of him for some reason.  Maybe they see something she doesn't, or maybe it all works out in the end.  

Honestly, this song kinda makes me stressed because the whole situation between overly-dramatic daughter and overly-dramatic mother is super unpleasant!  But the music is really groovy, Agnetha and Frida sing the part of the daughter really well, and I like how we even get Bjorn and Benny singing along in the chorus, and also the bass is really funky and fun in this song.  And then there's that really fun instrumental break.  

I guess this song is fun,  Lyrically, extremely stressful, but the rest of it is enjoyable. Perhaps another occurrence of ABBA's classic theme: Happy Music, Sad(or in this case unpleasant) Lyrics.