Portrait of an Effective Song: "Mama" by Genesis
I didn't like "Mama" by Genesis when I first heard it.* The grinding synthetic heartbeat that drives the song is unsettling, even anxiety-producing. Bump-bump, CRASH! Bump-bump, CRASH! Bump-bump, CRASH! Bump-bump, CRASH! It feels like a sci-fi Telltale Heart , a relentless pounding that hurtles toward insanity. I now consider "Mama" to be a brilliant and emotionally effective song. By emotionally effective, I mean that the song evocatively portrays the feelings contained therein, both instrumentally and lyrically. Keyboardist Tony Banks used some sort of unearthly synthesizer sound for the main melody, a kind of eerie whale call echoing into darkness. It resembles sounds you might hear in an old haunted house film, but manages to avoid sounding silly. Underneath the main melody is a subtle, but percussive and frenetic rapid-fire organ following along in time with the heartbeat. At other times, a more subtle synth pad fills in the sonic space, but nev