Frank & Moon Zappa – Valley Girl

I recently wrote about a novelty song, and that of course lead to thinking about other songs of this type. There’s a natural goofiness to such tunes, but it doesn’t mean that the artists writing and performing them aren’t deadly serious about what they’re doing, or applying all of their talents to make them, well, not great, because let’s not overstate this, but good, maybe. Frank Sinatra did one (“Mama Will Bark”, quickly defeating my above “good” position – WTF was Frank on when he agreed to this monstrosity?), as did The Coasters (“Yakety Yak”), Roger Miller (“You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd”), Chuck Berry (“My Ding-a-Ling”, which turns out to be about exactly what giggling 12-year-old me thought it was) and probable future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Warren Zevon (“Werewolves of London”).

I don’t know when I last heard “Valley Girl” in nature, but 1982 is definitely a possibility. And I know I still had positive memories of its silliness. So, when Spotify served it up one recent Sunday afternoon as part of my personal “Discover Weekly” playlist, I was struck with an odd joy on hearing the opening notes.

It didn’t last.

Frank Zappa apologised to his fans for this song – he promised never to accidentally write a hit again (giving a very elastic definition to “hit”), and he was good to his word. But I don’t think he had creator’s remorse about it. Elvis Costello once talked about hoping he never had a hit with a crappy song that he would then be forced to sing over and over again despite hating it. (For my money, he accomplished this unfortunate end with “Veronica”.) Zappa never seems to have expressed regret about the fact of “Valley Girl” existing (though this Letterman clip comes close), but only that it was successful. Alas, he was bothered by the wrong thing.

It sort of is a great song, if not a good one, and, yes, something can be the former without being the latter. Zappa hated the San Fernando Valley and the people who lived there, and turned his daughter Moon Unit’s gift for mimicking them into a satirical masterpiece that shows how ridiculous they are. (And, yes, that is her given name.) But that’s one of the problems with satire – it needs an audience that understands what is being satirised. In this case, the Valley aesthetic was largely unknown to the outside world, and the song helped popularise it for a brief time, which couldn’t have pleased Zappa very much.

Also, satire isn’t really designed to stand up to repeated scrutiny: there’s only so many times you can hear the same joke before you want to punch the person telling it to you. “Valley Girl” is almost five excruciating minutes long, and if the aim is to make you feel annoyed, it only half succeeds: I actually feel sort of sympathetic towards the girl that Moon is channelling, while dad Frank’s bits are just abrasive. Again, the latter at least seems to be intentional, but it doesn’t make it any more satisfying as a listen.

In the end, I’m glad I stumbled across this again. I was rooting for this song to be a hit in 1982 – it got to #18 in Canada – and just because 2023 me finds it annoying doesn’t devalue 1982 me’s love of it. And while I also enjoyed Buckner & Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever” – which is exactly as awful as you would expect – that year, I was also listening to albums from The Human League, Go-Go’s, Rush, Elvis Costello and ABC, so I wasn’t a complete idiot. I just had moments of idiocy, and we’ve all been there. Even Frank Sinatra.