The Shadow of the Valley Girl of Death, Part 2
Posted By Travis LeBlanc On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]4,098 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here [2])
Frank and Moon Zappa’s “Valley Girl”
The valley girl craze exploded in June of 1982 with the release of Frank Zappa’s single “Valley Girl.” For Zappa, who released 62 albums in his lifetime, it would be his only song to crack the Top 40.
Frank’s 14-year-old daughter Moon Zappa was upset that she never got to spend time with her father. Frank was perpetually on tour, leaving Moon to help raise her younger siblings with her long-suffering mother. When Frank was home, he would wake up at 8 PM and work in his home studio from 10 PM until 6 AM, when Moon was usually sleeping. One day she sent her father a letter asking if they could make a song together. Some time after that, Frank woke his daughter up in the middle of the night and asked her to come to his studio.
As Moon told People magazine at the time:
I would go to bar mitzvahs and come back speaking Valley lingo that everyone at the bar mitzvah was speaking, and the song came out of that . . . He wrote the song and then he asked me if I would improvise over what was already recorded and just do tracks of just straight talk. And so I just babbled on about my toenails and bondage and whatever else.
Frank wrote a song about Valley girls that would allow his daughter to improvise Valleyspeak over the music:
Valley girl
She’s a valley girl
Valley girl
She’s a valley girl
Okay, fine
Fer sure, fer sure
She’s a valley girl
That is Frank Zappa’s chorus. But the real star of the song was Moon Zappa, with her goofball delivery and exotic California slang:
It’s like grody
Grody to the max
I’m sure
It’s, like, really nauseating
Like, barf out
Gag me with a spoon!
Moon Zappa would later admit that not all of the slang in “Valley Girl” was genuine Valleyspeak. “Grody to the max” was a genuine Valley expression, but “gag me with a spoon” and “bag your face” were inventions of Frank and Moon. But even much of their invented slang were parodies of real expressions. “Gag me” was a real Valley expression, and one catchphrase of Gail Matthius’ Valley girl was “bite the bag.”
Something people found odd about “Valley Girl” is that there was a verse about sadomasochism, and Moon was only 14 when the song was recorded:
Anyway
He goes, “Are you into S and M?”
I go, oh, right
Could you, like, just picture me
In a, like, a leather teddy
Yeah, right
Hurt me, hurt me
I’m sure! No way!
He was, like, freaking me out
He called me a beastie
That’s ’cause, like
He was totally blitzed
He goes, like, bag your face!
I’m sure!
In an interview [3] celebrating the 40th anniversary of “Valley Girls”’ release, Moon commented on the S&M verse:
I think the S&M stuff is the product of growing up in a hypersexual home and seeing . . . From the time I was little, I would joke and say people were in the nude making candles near my playthings and we had a family . . . Uh . . . Not a portrait. There was a portrait in the family home of, like, kind of an orgy scene. There were Zippy the Pinhead comics laying around and weed and Hustler. There was a lot of stuff around. Vibrators. I had the bedroom next to my parents and heard sex. I knew my dad messed around on my mother. I’ve got many journals where I’ve got drawings of naked people chained up and having sex. It’s stuff that you shouldn’t be drawing at age 8, 9, and 10, but that was my environment. That’s the stuff I was exposed to. . . .
The thing that people don’t realize is that was me having private time with my father in a play, theatrical, and improvisational way and I didn’t filter anything. I didn’t edit. I didn’t censor. I was just trying to make my dad laugh. So for me, having it then appear on an album was a kind of exposure, an embarrassment, and a betrayal for me. I wasn’t thinking about, “We’re making a product.” I was thinking, “I’m spending time with my father” and I was thinking, “Oh, no. These people are going to get their feelings hurt. My teacher is going to get his feelings hurt.” I thought we going to get sued. I thought a truant officer was going to come and take me away. It was very stressful for me. I didn’t think of it in terms of, “Oh, I’m launching my career.”
The song became a massive hit on radio, especially on morning radio, and it made the Valley girl archetype a viral meme. Frank Zappa, however, came to deeply resent the song. Mainstream success had long eluded him, and when it finally came, it was with what many considered a novelty song:
There are a couple of things about “Valley Girl” being a hit: first, it’s not my fault — they didn’t buy that record because it had my name on it. They bought it because they liked Moon’s voice. It’s got nothing to do with the song or the performance. It has everything to do with the American public wanting to have some new syndrome to identify with. And they got it. . . . Hits are not necessarily musical phenomena.
Also, Frank Zappa felt that the audience did not really “get” what the song was saying. Frank Zappa intended the song to be more vitriolic than people interpreted it. As he told journalist Josef Woodard:
The worst thing about that record is the fact that nobody really listened to it. The whole coverage of the song barely mentioned what the song was really saying, that these people are really airheads.
In another interview, Zappa expressed his annoyance that people were starting to emulate the Valley girl vocal styling:
It just goes to show that the American public loves to celebrate the infantile. I mean, I don’t want people to act like that. I think Valley Girls are disgusting.
For her part, Moon Zappa was much more sympathetic to the Valley girl archetype:
I can only speak for myself but I was enchanted by the lyrical nature of this particular type of girl. I would have loved to have their nervous system. That I feel I could just shop and not worry about the stresses of being, say, the eldest child also helping to raise younger siblings. So for me to be in that fantasy moment of what it would be like to just have that kind of confidence and freedom.
Also in 1982 . . .
Before 1982 was over, there were two other things that came along that helped popularize Valleyspeak.
Two months after Zappa’s single dropped, Fast Times at Ridgemont High premiered. Fast Times was written by Cameron Crowe who, after dropping out of high school at age 16 to write for Rolling Stone, decided to go undercover as a high school student at age 22 to experience the senior year he never had. While Fast Times does not feature any stereotypical “Valley girl” archetypes, it was filmed in the San Fernando Valley. The film opens with one of the main characters getting a job at the mythical Sherman Oaks Galleria, the mall name-dropped by Moon Zappa in “Valley Girl.” While the film was only a moderate success in the theaters — it was, after all, an R-rated high school movie that most high schoolers couldn’t see in theaters) — it was a huge hit on cable and home video.
One of the characters is Jeff Spicoli, a long-haired surfer dude played by Sean Penn in his breakthrough role. Spicoli communicated entirely in surfer slang, and the popularity of his character played a big part in whetting people’s appetite for Cali slang. The terms “awesome,” “bogus,” “gnarly,” “tasty,” and “bitchin’” entered into common parlance across the country as a direct result of this character. As the decade progressed, Americans started talking more and more like Californians.
[4]You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here [5].
Penn’s performance is even more amazing when you consider that he has no sense of humor whatsoever. Forty years later, I still think of Sean Penn as “the guy from Fast Times.” He’s been nominated for a billion Academy Awards and has won twice, but he’ll always be Jeff Spicoli to me.
David Cole told me: “BTW, don’t forget to mention Square Pegs from 1982. THAT one made an impact. It was huge among the white kids in my Jr. high.” I was getting to that, Dave.
The high school sitcom Square Pegs debuted in September of 1982. Square Pegs was about two female nerds played by Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Linker who longed to break into the popular clique at their school, and most episodes revolve around some scheme to elevate their social status. The show was ahead of its time in some ways, as the in-crowd/out-crowd dichotomy would become a major theme in ‘80s teen movies, particularly those of John Hughes. While the show was critically acclaimed and featured an impressive array of guest appearances from the likes of Bill Murray [6] and Devo [7], it was cancelled after one season due to low ratings — it aired opposite Monday Night Football — and rumors of backstage debauchery [8] among the cast.
But for the purposes of this article, Square Pegs is noteworthy for featuring the character of Jennifer DiNuccio, played by Tracey Nelson (granddaughter of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, the latter who is in turn the daughter of singer Ricky Nelson, and an older sibling of Matthew and Gunnar Nelson of the much-ridiculed [9] hair metal band Nelson). In the show, Jennifer DiNuccio is the popular girl who acts as a foil to the two outcast protagonists. DiNuccio conspicuously speaks with a Valley Girl accent:
The funny thing about Square Pegs is that it supposedly takes place somewhere near New York City, and yet you can tell by the climate and scenery that it was obviously filmed in California (at the abandoned Excelsior High School [10] in Los Angeles, to be exact). This yields some amusingly disorienting results. The other popular kid featured in the show is a guy named Vinnie Pasetta, who speaks with a Brooklyn accent. So there is Calispeak and Brooklynspeak existing in the same high school. Also noteworthy is that the two popular kids both have Italian names, while the nerdy kids are either Jewish or Jewish-looking.
Both Fast Times and Square Pegs were already in production when Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl” dropped, so they cannot be interpreted as being inspired by the song, but it would not be long before the cynical cash in started rolling in.
Valley Girl Mania
Atlantic Entertainment Group is a now-defunct indie film studio that specialized in arthouse and exploitation films. After the viral success of “Valley Girl,” Atlantic sought to capitalize by making a film set in the Valley featuring characters speaking in Valleyspeak. They moved quickly. A script was banged out in ten days and the movie was shot in a month on a $350,000 budget. The finished produc,t titled Valley Girl [11], hit theaters in April of 1983, a mere ten months after the release of Zappa’s single.
While Frank Zappa’s song “Valley Girl” was laced with venom and presented Valley girls as a caricature, Valley Girl director Martha Coolidge sought to present a more authentic and sympathetic image. The cast were sent to a Valley high school and spoke with teenagers to get a feel for the culture.
The film starred Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage. It was Cage’s second film credit (he had had a non-speaking role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), his first lead role, and his first film under the name Nicolas Cage (he was credited by his real name, Nicolas Coppola, in Fast Times). Ostensibly, Valley Girl was supposed to be a sort of modern Romeo and Juliet with all the depressing parts removed. Foreman plays Julie, a preppy rich girl from the Valley, and Cage is Randy, a hardboiled punk-rock enthusiast from the mean streets of Hollywood. It’s typical ‘80s fare: scrappy outsider guy pursues socially aristocratic girl, fire and ice, opposites attract — you know the drill. If you’ve seen one ‘80s teen movie, you’ve seen them all.
Noteworthy is that there is one scene where Nicolas Cage brings Foreman to a gritty indie rock club where Foreman is made to feel like a fish out of water (fun fact: the club in question was The Central, which would later become the famous Viper Room). This stands out to me because one of the five SNL Vickey and Debbie sketches involves the duo going to a punk-rock club and interacting with a character named Tommy Torture, who was based on Sid Vicious, who had died in a New York hotel room two years prior. This would suggest that while Gail Matthius does not get credit for her role in the Valley girl craze, she certainly did influence those who came after her.
Valley Girl was a success in theaters, grossing $17.3 million, almost 50 times its budget.
From there, the Valley girl fad turned into a complete mania. Valley girl characters started popping up in movies, television, and commercials. Female comedians and TV and radio personalities across the country began adopting the Valley girl persona. Then there was an endless array of Valley girl-themed merchandise: books, cosmetics, perfumes, clothing, and accessory lines.
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Someone who was incredibly bitter about the fad was Frank Zappa, because while he was chiefly responsible it, he received very little money from it. Moon Zappa says of Frank’s reaction:
My father was angry about the businesses that responded outside of the song because he didn’t get any revenue from those. A lot of people were getting hired to do voiceovers in their cities or their states and so I had a lot of people writing me or approaching me in person saying, “Oh, because of you I bought a farm because I was the voice of the Valley girl in Chicago,” or “I was the voice of the Valley girl in Texas.” So there were a lot of benefits that people experience that I think that my father felt that should have come to him that went to other people.
In fact, Frank Zappa filed a lawsuit to try to prevent the movie Valley Girl getting made by claiming that it infringed on his trademark. The suit was laughed out of court.
Zappa did license some “official” Valley girl merchandise, one example of which was The Official Valley Girl Coloring Book. Frank wrote the introduction in his trademark misanthropic style:
Dear person who likes to consume stupid Valley Girl merchandise. . . . Ever since the album Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch was released and America discovered the song “Valley Girl,” many of those anonymous little companies who crank out disposable poot for persons such as yourself to identify with have worked overtime to flood the market with disgusting types of UNAUTHORIZED VALLEY GIRL SWILL. NOW . . . AT LAST! REAL GENUINE SWILL FROM PRICE/STERN/SLOAN WITH THE VALLEY GIRL AROMA! From the moment you purchase this splendid little item and get out your crayons, you can become personally involved in one of the dumbest fads to hit the streets in years.
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The person who most successfully rode the Valley girl wave was Los Angeles-based actress/comedian Julie Brown. Brown said in a 2007 interview [16]:
I was doing the Valley Girl persona in nightclubs. And then suddenly, “Valley Girl” the song comes out. And I got so depressed. I mean, that’s my character! But then I thought, wait a minute. I can still do this. [The Zappas] don’t own this. So that’s when I started thinking that I can do music.
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Brown came from an entertainment industry family. Both her parents worked for NBC. Brown’s grandfather was an actor who had small roles in Citizen Kane and Reefer Madness, while her grandmother was the voice of Minnie Mouse in Spanish. Brown started in comedy in the late 1970s, which means she was active in the LA comedy scene at the same time that Gail Matthius was fleshing out her Vickey Valley character, so one wonders if that was an influence. However, unlike Gail Matthius and Moon Zappa, Julie Brown was a real ,honest-to-God Valley girl born and raised in the San Fernando Valley.
In 1983 Julie Brown [18] released the independent single I Like ’em Big and Stupid [19], with the song “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun [20]” as its b-side. Both songs were sung in a Valley girl accent and became enormously popular on the Dr. Demento radio show. For the benefit of younger and international readers who might not know, Dr. Demento was a nationally-syndicated radio show that played novelty songs. Dr. Demento’s biggest claim to fame was breaking a then-unknown Weird Al Yankovich to a national audience. More novelty songs followed throughout the decade, including “Girl Fight Tonight! [21]” and my personal favorite, “Trapped in the Body of a White Girl [22],” all of which received heavy rotation on MTV.
Julie Brown became an in-demand media personality throughout the ‘80s, which culminated in the 1988 Valley girl-themed sci-fi romcom Earth Girls are Easy [23], which was written by and starred Brown. Alas, the film bombed at the box office, which suggests that the Valley girl fad was waning. Her dreams of movie stardom dashed, Brown settled for a weekly comedy show on MTV which, to be honest, is not a bad consolation prize. The show, Just Say Julie, aired for three seasons from 1989-1992 . As the 1990s wore on, Brown would pivot away from satirizing Valley girls and moved on to lampooning Madonna [24].
The Revenge of Gail Matthius
By the late 1980s, the shine was starting to come off Los Angeles. In 1987, the ultra-bleak film Less Than Zero was released that presented the darker side of the LA party scene. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Brett Easton Ellis, the movie is about a college freshman played by Andrew McCarthy who returns to home to Los Angeles for Christmas break to find that all his friends from high school are now strung out on hard drugs. His ex-girlfriend is addicted to cocaine, and his best friend Julian (played by Robert Downey, Jr. in his breakout role) is now $50,000 in debt to his dealer and has been forced to become a male prostitute to pay it off. I saw Less Than Zero as a kid and was quite shocked by it. Up to that point, my image of LA had been informed by films such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Beverly Hills Cop, and The Karate Kid, which showed LA as a fantasyland of glamor and effortless fun, and so Less Than Zero’s portrayal of it as a place of nihilistic hedonism and squalid misery was quite jarring. While best known for writing American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis will always be “the Less Than Zero guy” to me.
[25]Robert Downey, Jr. in Less Than Zero
In 1988, the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years came out. It has since been credited with playing a major role in the death of the Los Angeles glam metal scene, which had been an all-conquering cultural force throughout most of the 1980s. The documentary interviews many aspiring Los Angeles-based glam metal musicians who are shown to be vapid, delusionally egotistical, and oftentimes buffoonish characters who seem to care about nothing more than fame, money, sex, and partying. White youth’s attention began to drift away from LA’s glam scene to the San Francisco thrash scene, and later Seattle grunge, both of which seemed refreshingly “authentic” and substantive by comparison.
The late 1980s also saw the emergence of gangsta rap, which brought national attention to the epidemic of gang violence between Bloods and Crips on the streets of Los Angeles. And then the cherry on top was the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, which saw widespread violence and looting. All these factors contributed shattering people’s idealistic image of Los Angeles, and by the early 1990s, Seattle would come to dethrone LA as the Capitol of Cool.
But this was not the end of the Valley girl story. Remember Gail Matthius from a few thousand words back? In the 1990s she became a highly sought-after voice actress. At one point, she was working on nine shows simultaneously. For many of the characters that she voiced, she used the stereotypical Valley girl accent. The most prominent example of this was the character Shirley the Loon from the Emmy-winning cartoon Tiny Toon Adventures.
Thus, even after the fad died, the echoes still reverberated.
So why did the Valley girl accent catch on?
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Around this time, people discovered that once girls started talking like a Valley girl, they found it very difficult to stop. Speech pathologist Lillian Glass wrote a book on techniques for breaking the habit.
So now we know where the dumb white bitch voice came from. Now we have to ask why it caught on. After all, the Valley girl archetype was initially seen as an absurd comic stereotype loaded with an array of negative connotations: dumb, materialistic, shallow. Why would white women then want to start imitating them?
Let’s go back to our friend Tyanna Slobe and her thoughts on the Valley girl archetype:
While this particular stereotype may be iconic of LA and California, the persona has transcended the Valley and is associated with cosmopolitan white femininity all over the US. She does not “live” anywhere in particular; instead she is more recognized through elite institutions and social practices, like Starbucks and shopping.
[27]You can buy Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies here [28]
People now associate the Valley girl accent with high status and/or socially aristocratic white girls such as sorority girls and girls in the popular clique at high schools. Perhaps that was always the case. After all, David Cole said that when he first heard the accent, it was from the two prettiest girls in his school. So there’s a clue. White girls talk like that because girls want to be seen as high status.
But what is it about the accent that makes girls think it sounds high status? I think Moon Zappa has the answer:
If I think about it like an archetype, then I am thinking about somebody who is ultimately free and that it’s a lightness . . . It’s a freedom from heaviness. So I think there will always be some kind of appeal if there’s some part of you that longs to not carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.
And there it is. The purpose of the dumb white bitch voice is to convey a sense that their life is good, that they are not stressed, and that they have transcended the everyday burdens that afflict the common folk. This is a quality that most people associate with those who are high status.
The Death of the Valley Girl
Alas, like the cockneys of Britain, Valley girls are slowly going extinct. In fact, their ethnic cleansing was going on even during their 1980s heyday. In the 2002 policy paper “The Changing Face of the San Fernando Valley,” Joel Kotkin and Erika Ozuna state:
As recently as the 1960s, about nine out of ten Valley residents were Caucasian. By 1980, however, as much as twenty-five percent of the population was a racial or ethnic minority. Change in the 1980s was even more rapid, with the most dramatic decreases in white population taking place in the central parts of the Valley. Some areas that had been over eighty percent white at the beginning of the decade were now forty percent or less by the end.
Today, whites in the San Fernando Valley are now outnumbered [29] by Hispanics (42.5% Hispanic versus 40.1% white).
But fear not. While the Valley girl may be going the way of the dodo bird, her memory will live on in the way white people talk — white women especially, but progressive white men as well [30], all due to this brief moment in time and space when her tiny corner of the universe took center stage.
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