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jaime danehey
on
Frank Zappa & Moon Unit Zappa, “Valley Girl”

(march fadness, 80s edition)

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jaime danehey on “valley girl”

The first time I heard the 1982 hit “Valley Girl” was in the mid-90s at “morning jam”—a post-breakfast dance party that kicked off each day of state student council camp in Wayne, Nebraska. The DJ was some cool college-aged counselor, who packed that CD because he knew we would be there. The gaggle of Valley girls. 
The song itself was new to me, but its imprint wasn’t—everyone knew what a Valley girl sounded like. I spent the 90s attending middle school and high school in Valley, Nebraska. While we didn’t use that 80s slang, the echo of the Valley Girl character was part of my self-image. Like, totally.

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“I’m comparing the magnitude of the impact you [Moon Zappa] made on America to Madonna.” —Justine Bateman, Friday Night Videos, December 1985.

The 1980s added two new American teenage archetypes to the culture. There were already Jocks, Preps, Greasers, Nerds, Burnouts. . .but not until the 1980s did we have Goths and Valley Girls.
In the shorthand of pop culture, the Valley Girl was a teenager who loved shopping and hanging out at the mall with her friends. While a Goth was distinguished by clothing, hair and makeup, a Valley Girl’s calling card was language. She and her friends spoke their own hilarious dialect.
Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl” is directly responsible for this. In the L.A. region people may have been familiar with mall-going teenage girls talking in a unique slang about boys and clothes. But it wasn’t something people in the rest of the country knew about. With this song, Valley Girls and their way of speaking swept the culture outside of the San Fernando Valley.
We have Frank’s oldest child, 14-year-old Moon Zappa, to thank. Her effervescent portrayal of a Valley Girl charmed the masses. Frank was making a statement about materialism—but like teenagers throughout time, the kids in 1982 ignored that lesson and latched onto the fun at the core of the song. Moon’s humorous, but not mocking, delivery is the key to the song’s success and the spread of her speaking style. 

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ABC could have produced a bitchin’ Afterschool Special on the origin story of “Valley Girl.” Moon was the oldest of four kids, with a musician father who toured the majority of the year. When he was home he worked in the home studio at night and slept in the day.  Frank had his own record label, and his wife Gail spent her time on managing the business side of everything. Musicians and friends came and went from the house regularly. 
Moon later described herself as “enchanted” by the Valley girls she met in school and at parties. She was fascinated by their confidence, freedom and lightness. When you spend a lot of time around adults and their hang ups, it can be amazing to meet girls intent on the pursuit of their own teenage interests, heedless of how they are judged by the larger world.
Frustrated by her father’s absence in her daily life, she left him a note. It proposed that since it was the only way she could spend time with him, she’d like to work with him in the studio.
One school night, Frank took her up on the offer. He woke her up around 2 a.m. and invited her into the studio to improvise some Val speak for a song he was working on. It was a playful session—Moon making her father laugh, responding to prompts, daughter and father making up ridiculous slang together.
She didn’t think anyone she knew would ever hear the track. Frank Zappa had been active since the ‘60s and had a devoted fan base, but he didn’t get played on the radio. Recording “Valley Girl” with her dad was unfiltered, private goofiness, with no thought about other people’s reactions.
The promo copy of the “Valley Girl” has a jacket dense with Frank’s own brand of marketing copy, puckish about the lack of interest that the industry has in his music. One example of many: “In the tradition of Aerosmith and Van Halen, which this album is not, excitement does not exist, nor will it mysteriously appear, since who cares if there’s another Zappa album anyway.” Frank and his band headed out for a May-August European tour; the single was released in June.
I cringed with recognition learning Moon’s reaction when she first heard the song on the radio. She felt bad. Her delivery on that song was partly imitating real people, would they feel hurt? The monologue about a teacher was based on a real person, would this bring him negative attention? It’s a special, shame-inducing dread when someone you make fun of finds out what you said. How much worse to have it coming over the car radio?
The success of “Valley Girl”—a Frank Zappa song that actually got played on the radio!—came as a surprise to everyone. With Frank overseas touring, Moon was expected to do promotion in his stead. Think of yourself at 14: can you imagine being thrust onto television alone to chat with old man talk show hosts and lip sync on Solid Gold? For your friends to see you? What a nightmare! Unlike her character in the song, Moon was well-spoken and used to conversing with adults. But she did not aspire to be a musician and it had to be a major drag to explain Valley Girls to adults over and over.
The song peaked at #32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in September 1982. But pop culture was just getting started with Valley Girls.  

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Let us give credit where credit is due: Moon Zappa’s performance on “Valley Girl” changed spoken American English. She spread “Val speak” nationwide, and added some key new phrases to the lexicon. Silly things she made up on the fly, like “gag me with a spoon” entered the teenage language canon. Justine Bateman was serious, in that Friday Night Videos clip linked earlier. Moon, who in 1982 was not old enough to drive a Chevette or buy a pack of Pall Malls, had a huge impact on our language.
Looking back, it makes perfect sense to me that girls embraced this new argot. Everything about it is fun: sharing a special dialect with your friends; saying “barf” a lot; and for sure annoying your parents and teachers.
The fad took hold quickly in the wake of “Valley Girl.” Before 1982 was over, the cartoonist Mimi Pond wrote and illustrated The Valley Girl’s Guide to Life, “prominent Beverly Hills speech pathologist” Dr. Lillian published How to Deprogram Your Valley Girl, a half-serious book with tips on fixing your daughter’s speech pattern, and the hit sitcom Family Ties premiered, featuring a teenage daughter who had the word “mall” in her name. In spring 1983, Martha Coolidge’s film Valley Girl was released, a rarity for its sympathetic curiosity about Valley Girls, and what it’s like to grow up with that group identity.   
That movie stands out, since—duh!—the larger pop culture was content to mock Valley Girls (teenage girls) for being annoying, shallow and stupid. Instead of hanging out with friends at the mall, what were they supposed to be doing? I think the answer is “focus on pleasing others.” A “good” teenage girl would be babysitting, doing homework, speaking respectfully, or cheering on their boyfriend at the big game.

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I didn’t move to Valley, Nebraska, population ~1,600, until the very end of the ‘80s. This was a world away from Moon Zappa in Laurel Canyon, but I was also an oldest child with a busy mother and a far-away dad, who envied the seeming ease of other girls.
It took me a while to click at this new school but once I did, I loved the idea of being one of the Valley girls. The phrase still carried a feeling of being light, amusing, and (maybe most attractive) the security of traveling in packs.
Malls were nothing new by the time I became a Valley girl, but we still delighted in teenage talk. I can remember getting caught up in the flow of it—at school, on the bus, on the phone—full of our own made-up slang and in-jokes. I jotted a glossary in the front of one of my own journals, apparently worried that my future self would not remember what half of these words and nicknames referred to. (It’s too embarrassing to excerpt.)
Mentioning a teenage journal brings to mind all the painful moments and intense emotions of those years—the fodder for so many books, movies, and songs. “Valley Girl” gives us the flip side, which is more easily forgotten. What I love most about this song is the kernel of joy Moon delivers. The spirit of her performance reminds me of uninhibited goofing around with middle school friends, pure fun that only a 14-year-old girl could deliver.
That Valley Girl spirit was alive and well in us—getting wired by eating Tang out of the jar, using fake British accents at the mall, filming nonsensical comedy skits at sleepovers, and making up our own words to the classic rock songs on the radio. (Guess what we changed “American Girl” to?)

Jaime Danehey graduated from Valley High School in 1996. Her favorite store at the new Oakview Mall was Express.