The Shadow of the Valley Girl of Death,
Part 1

3,270 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

With “Valley Girl,” my daughter did a radio interview and brought along an acetate of the song. They played it on the air, and the phones went crazy. The station held on to the acetate and kept playing it, and the thing was such an instant grassroots hit that other stations were taping it off the air and playing it. It didn’t sell a lot — maybe 350,000 copies — and the album Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch maybe did 125,000 units; but sociologically it was the most important record of 1982 in the United States. — Frank Zappa

Tyanna Slobe was seeking her Master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Colorado and needed a topic for her thesis. She had been watching YouTube comedy videos and noticed a pattern. Whenever a comedian or actor did an imitation of a stereotypical white girl, they would always use the exact same voice: a lot of uptalk, vocal fry, saying “like” every other word, and so on. There’s an entire genre of videos on YouTube called “things white girls say,” which is dedicated to people doing anti-white parodies of the stereotypical white girl — and every single one of them uses the same voice. Slobe gave a name to that voice: Mock White Girl, or MWG, and she made it the topic of her thesis.

“Mock white girl (MWG) performances parody a linguistic and embodied style associated with contemporary middle class white girls in the United States,” Slobe writes in the abstract for her article on the subject for the journal Language in Society. She highlights the defining qualities of MWG as “for example, creaky voice, uptalk, blondeness, and Starbucks.”

If you want to read the article, it’s $26. Fortunately, there is another article where Slobe give a Cliff’s Notes summary of her thesis and gives more insight into how she developed it:

I got the idea for this research one day while ordering a latte at a hipster Boulder café, after I told the barista my order and he repeated it back in an exaggerated “girl” sounding voice. While he was clearly joking, I realized that he was mocking something related to gender, maybe age, and a particular speaking style, and I became interested in the stigma at root of his mocking performance.

No, it’s not what you think. The experience did not red-pill her on the implicit anti-whiteness baked into our cultural cake and cause her to become an anti-anti-white crusader:

While semiotic variables used to index the white girl persona are consistent across performances, there is significant variation in performers’ ideological stances relative to the mocked figure of personhood: white girls in the US are not “heard” in any one way by all social actors.

In other words, she thinks MWG can be a force for good or evil. For example, when non-whites use MWG, it’s “to draw attention to and parody racist things that white girls frequently say and do. In these examples, mock is a resource used to humorously call out white racism.” However, if teenage boys use MWG, it is to “cast the mocked persona as superficial, irrational, and comical in ways that position teenage girls’ homosocial peer groups as vapid, and thus illegitimate sites of sociality.”

But then Slobe uses a term that sent me on a nostalgia trip and cast my mind back to when I was just a wee little baby Trav:

The linguistic, embodied, and social features of MWG are taken up and (re)produced by different social actors across various cultural contexts. Performances are invoked through hyperbolic use of a bunch of linguistic and stylistic variables, including things like uptalk, vocal fry, dynamic intonation, texting language, blondeness, and objects associated with material consumerism, like Starbucks and iPhones. The persona is widely-circulated in U.S. pop culture, and the relevant linguistic variety is often associated with the ’80s and ’90s Valley Girl from Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, represented in cult classic films, such as Clueless and Legally Blonde.

“Valley girl.” Now, that is a term I had not heard in a while. Back in the 1980s and for many years thereafter, what we now think of as the stereotypical white bimbo voice was called “talking like a valley girl.”

The fact is that all the annoying verbal quirks among younger people that drive older people up the wall can be traced back to a handful of years in the mid-1980s when the country became enthralled by the outrageous slang and bizarre linguistic peculiarities of teenage girls in one specific middle-class suburb of Los Angeles that began with a song by Frank Zappa:

The influence of the American Valley girl accent can be compared to the cockney accent in Britain. The cockney accent is native to one specific area of East London, although people found the accent so appealing that those in the rest of Britain started incorporating elements of it into their own speech. Aspects of the Valley girl accent that have crossed over into American language in general include:

• Dropped vowels: A tendency to pronounce all vowels with a more open mouth, making them shift toward ah.
• Vocal fry: The lowering of the vocal tone to create a rough vibrating sound.
• Uptalk: Raising pitch at the end of phrases, as if asking a question, such that “I went to the mall” ends up sounding like “I went to the mall?”
• The use of “so” as a precursor: “So I was walking down the street.”
• End emphasis: Making the ends of phrases louder and/or more elongated; e.g., “Stop it” becomes “Stop iiiiit” and “No, I didn’t” becomes “No I DIDN’T.”
• Glottalizing: Dropping consonants. For example, “di’unt” instead of “didn’t” and “impor’unt” instead of “important.”

But most notable is the use of “like” as a filler word — e.g., “The restaurant was, like, really expensive” — came into common parlance as a direct result of the 1980s Valley girl craze.

For older American readers, this essay will be a trip down memory lane, but younger and some international readers might not know the story of where the white bimbo voice came from. So now we will step into the Counter-Currents TARDIS and go back in time to Southern California in the 1980s.

Cali-philia in the 1980s

From the 1970s through the 1980s, there was a large pop-cultural shift wherein the center of attention moved from New York to Los Angeles. Pop culture of the 1970s had a distinctly New York flavor. For one, the country became weirdly fascinated with Italians. The most celebrated actors of the day were named Pacino, DeNiro, and Stallone, and the most celebrated directors were Scorsese and Coppola. The most popular TV character was named Fonzerelli and the biggest teen heartthrob was John Travolta. The 1970s were also the disco era, which is intertwined in the public imagination with New York. The mere word “disco” conjures up images of Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever. KISS, the most popular American rock band of the era, were from New York, and Saturday Night Live, the most popular TV show, was broadcast from New York City.

You can buy James O’Meara’s End of an Era here.

But by the late 1970s, New York had become a depressing place. It was dirty, graffiti was everywhere, crime was out of control, and Times Square was choked with hookers and porn theaters. The glamor of New York wasn’t what it once had been, and it would be a couple of decades, until Sex and the City, that New York would regain its reputation as a chic place to live. In the 1980s, people thought of New York as a dump. At the same time, there was a popular revolt against disco, the most New York of musical genres, led by Midwesterners pining for a return of rock ‘n’ roll.

New York appeared to be dying, while California was a state on the move. In 1962, it surpassed New York to become America’s most populous state, and in 1984, Los Angeles passed Chicago to become America’s second-biggest city. In 1980, America elected its first Californian President, Ronald Reagan. Everyone knew that computers were going to be the next big thing, and California had Silicon Valley. From the ashes of New York disco arose a glam metal scene in Los Angeles that would dominate radio and MTV for the next decade. There was a sense that the future of America was Californian.

The California of my youth seemed like a dream world where the weather was always good and everyone was good-looking. There were no fat chicks in California, because they went to the beach all the time, so they all had to look good in a bikini. They would even resort to bulimia if they had to. All the most iconic movies of the era seemed to take place in California, particularly Los Angeles: The Terminator, Back to the Future, The Karate Kid, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which became the highest-grossing movie of all time. All the coolest rock bands from Van Halen to Motley Crue to Guns ‘N’ Roses came from Los Angeles

I think of the 1980s as the California decade, as it seemed to be the center of the universe. There’s a certain aesthetic that people associate with the 1980s which looks like this:

At the time, people associated that aesthetic with California. Now, if you wanna get deep in the weeds, that aesthetic was actually invented by an Italian design firm, but it first caught on with surf and skateboard culture in California, and so most associated it with California. From there, it spread across the country until it eventually became the official aesthetic of 1980s youth culture.

The Valley

Prior to the 1980s, the San Fernando Valley did not receive a whole lot of national attention and was overshadowed by other parts of Las Angeles, such as Hollywood (movie studios), Beverly Hills (where the rich people live), and Malibu (where all the 1960s beach party movies took place). One notable exception was the 1944 Roy Rogers film San Fernando Valley, which was about a cattle ranch (the Valley was still largely rural in 1944). The film’s theme song, sung by Bing Crosby, reached #1 on the charts.

In the 35 years between 1945 and 1980, the population of San Fernando Valley more than quadrupled from 230,000 to over a million. No longer was the Valley a sleepy rural landscape of boarding houses and bedroom communities, but a sprawling, affluent upper-middle-class commuter suburb for yuppies, their trophy wives, and their children. The Valley was generally wealthier, whiter, and safer than most parts of LA, and as such, the youth of the Valley were seen as softies lacking the same kind of street smarts that one developed in the rougher parts of town. Starting in the late 1970s, Los Angelinos started to view people from the Valley as having their own distinct subculture, and the people from there were dubbed Vals.

More than that, people from the Valley, especially girls, started to develop their own distinct accent. Dissident Right writer Steve Sailer was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, and has mused on the Valley girl accent in the past. In a 2020 tweet, Sailer gave his theory on the accent’s origin:

My guess is that the 1970s spread of second phone lines for adolescent daughters in the affluent southern San Fernando Valley allowed them to spend so much time on the phone with each other that they developed their own regional accent, the Valley Girl.

David Cole Throws Me a Curveball

I wanted to get the perspective of someone who was living in Los Angeles during the height of the Valley girl craze, and because I don’t have Steve Sailer’s contact info, I sent a message to Takimag writer David Cole, who was a teenager in the early 1980s. I asked him the following two questions:

Was the famous Valley girl accent distinct to the Valley, or was it a more general Los Angeles accent that somehow got attributed strictly to girls from the Valley?

What was your reaction to hearing Frank Zappa’s song “Valley Girl”?

Cole answered:

I first noticed the widespread use of the “Valley Girl” accent/manner in 1979, here on the Westside (far from the Valley) in my elementary school. The two prettiest white chicks in my class spoke that way, and when Saturday Night Live (during its abysmal 1980 season) parodied the persona with a series of recurring sketches, I clearly recall saying, “Hmm . . .they’re talking just like Teri and Leslie.

So I can certainly say it was not just in the Valley, and it was a “thing” years before the Zappa song in 1982 (indeed, at the time I saw the song as merely piggybacking off the SNL sketches).

I’ve never studied its history, but I think if you watch, say, episodes of Gidget, you’ll already see the beginnings of “fer sherr” and “like, wow!” (“gnarly” was a surfer term before it was a Valley girl term). My guess is that there were already white youth-culture “California-isms” in the ‘60s that were exacerbated by the hippie chicks who infested it at the time (“like, oh wow, man”). By the time I was in junior high — again, Westside, not Valley — half the white chicks I knew spoke that way.

That was a curveball. By this point I had read countless articles about the Valley girl accent, and every single one said that its first widespread exposure was through Frank and Moon Zappa’s “Valley Girl” single. Not a single article mentioned anything about Saturday Night Live. So I did some research, and I’ll be damned . . .

Gail Matthius: Proto-Valley Girl

It turns out that there was indeed a recurring sketch in Saturday Night Live’s sixth season that featured a character speaking in the stereotypical Valley girl accent a full two years before the release of Frank Zappa’s single:

So why did Gail Mathius’ Valley girl get memory-holed? Why is she not getting any credit for her role in starting the craze? To understand that, you have to know the lore about the sixth season of Saturday Night Live.

Of the 48 seasons of SNL as of now, the sixth is by far the most infamous. It is sometimes called “the lost season” or “the forgotten season.” Few people have seen it, but many have heard about it. The original 1975 SNL dream team that included John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, and later Bill Murray were contracted for five years. By 1980 the entire cast were household names and they all left to do movies. Subsequent contract negotiations between NBC and SNL producer Lorne Michaels broke down, and the entire writing staff left with him in solidarity. Whoever took over was going to have to build an entirely new staff from scratch while making a show that met the high standards the audience had come to expect. It was a similar situation to when Sean Connery left the James Bond film series.

The original cast had set an impossibly high standard. The audience had gotten accustomed to Bill Murray and Chevy Chase in their prime. Now they got Denny Dillon, Gilbert Gottfried, Gail Matthius, Joe Piscopo, Ann Risley, and Charles Rocket. Rocket, whom Executive Producer Jean Doumanian was banking on to become the breakout star among the new cast, failed to launch. The new SNL was despised by critics and audiences alike, who considered it “Saturday Night Live in name only.” The audience dropped by 30% and the show even fell in the ratings behind ABC’s short-lived SNL rip-off Fridays. After the twelfth episode of the sixth season, the producer and half the cast were fired. A writers’ strike mercifully cut the season short after 13 episodes, after which the new producer fired the remaining season 6 cast apart from Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.

Both NBC and the viewing public were happy to pretend that this season never happened. It was never released on video, and while its episodes are now available on streaming services, they are heavily edited. Some did not just find the season unfunny, but offensive, as the new writers tried to compensate for their lack of satirical wit by being extra edgy. The sexual humor was raunchier. There were also a lot of jokes about hard drugs, which became a touchy subject for SNL after John Belushi’s death by overdose in 1982. There was also some saucy racial humor. In the first episode, there’s a sketch where Jimmy Carter blames his election loss to Ronald Reagan on the Jews. In the second episode, the word “nigger” is used. If you want to watch full episodes of Season 6, you have to go to torrents.

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Beyond this, however, Gail Matthius’ Vickey character was not a true Valley girl. Matthius was born and raised in South Dakota. After graduating from high school, she moved to Minneapolis for college and started dabbling in standup and sketch comedy. After college she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked in standup until she was discovered by SNL scouts. Gail has said in interviews that her Vicky character was based on a girl she went to high school with in South Dakota and that she had been developing the persona since her time in Minneapolis.

While the way she spoke as the character would later be known as the “Valley Girl accent,” she did not embody the Valley girl archetype. The stereotypical Valley girl was materialistic, upper middle class, and a social aristocrat. Vickey is a social outsider with one co-dependent friend named Debbie. There is also a running joke in the sketches about Vicky and Debbie’s desire to go to VoTech after high school. For those who don’t know, VoTech was sort of 1980s meme, a trade school that was running a ton of commercials on TV. The joke was that VoTech is where you go if you are too dumb, too poor, or too lacking in ambition to go to a real college. In one Vickey and Debbie sketch, Debbie says, “Yeah, that’s why I think we ought to go to VoTech and meet some of those college guys.”

Perhaps you had to be there.

Matthius’ Vickey character is likewise never identified as being Californian, and there are reasons to believe that she is not. In several sketches, Vicky’s friend Debbie is wearing winter clothes. Her character wears a letterman’s jacket which strikes me as more of a Midwestern thing. Vickey has a habit of ending her sentences with “gah” to express exasperation, which I remember stuck-up girls in the Midwest doing before Valleyspeak chic. In the movie Napoleon Dynamite, which takes place in Idaho, the main character does it several times:

And yet, native Californian David Cole found the accent convincingly Californian. So how do we circle this square?

As Cole said, there were cultural precursors to the Valley accent. There was hippie talk and surfer lingo. It should also be noted that the use of “like” as a filler word was a thing among the beatniks, who did it to emphasize informality. In the below video, you can see Bob Denver playing the beatnik Maynard G. Krebbs. You’ll notice that he says “like” in almost every sentence:

Gail Matthius graduated from high school in 1971, during the hippie era. My guess is that Gail’s friend was likely a hippie, and then when Gail moved to LA, she incorporated Calispeak into the character to make her more relatable to the LA audience.

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