The Valley Girl Mirrors The Eighties
By Carrie Stetler
Without a doubt, this summer's most audible slang was "Valley," and even though the San Fernando Valley is all the way across the country in California, teenagers up and down the East Coast were also things like "Grody to the Max" and "Gag me with a spoon." You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing the Valley Girl's nasaly tales of dirty dishes and gay English teachers.
After the song hit Top Forty, it became the basis of a new vocabulary for American kids who had never even heard the word "tubular" before. By late August, many had the song memorized and there was always at least one girl at every party who could do a flawless Valley Girl impersonation.
"Valley Girl" was originally written by veteran rock, weirdo, Frank Zappa, but the bulk of the song is a long ad-libbed monologue blurted out by his daughter, Moon Unit Zappa. In "Valley Girl," Moon affects the kind of grating, tenny-bopper voice that is all too familiar to California and non-California residents alike.
It is the voice of a shallow, empty-headed adolescent girl whose only concern sems to be finding a place to get her toenails cut and going to "like clothing stores and stuff and like buying the neatest mini-skirts and stuff." The Valley Girl not only inhabits the San Fernando Valley, she's in every city across America, walking endlessly thorough shopping malls and trying to find "a pair of jeans to fit her butt."
Instead of painting a portrait of the sweet, starry-eyed teen queens that are often the subject of current pop songs, Zappa and his daughter chose to represent the young woman of today in a more satirical light. They talk about their orthodontist appointments, call their mothers "space cadets" and think everything's "gross." There is nothing romantic about them at all. Valley Girls are just dumb, materialistic kids who can't even express themselves properly without resorting to constant slang expressions like "bitchin'" and "awesome."
Although only fourteen years old, Moon Zappa captures perfectly the empty, irritating speech patterns of the Valley Girl in her rambling accounts of life in Encino, California. She sounds so authentic that you could swear you have met her somewhere before and you probably have. Everyone knows a Valley Girl. She is as eternal and repititious as the "Valley girl, she's a Valley Girl," chorus Frank Zappa sings in the background while his daughter is talking.
Although it is deceptively amusing, the song is really more than a silly girl who talks funny. It is a comment on the youth of the 80's, but many people don't think about the song's message. Zappa himself complained that everyone thought "Valley Girl" was "cute."
"Ondrya" Wolfson, as the Valley Girl calls herself in the song, has this year's "Big Thing" in addition to being a symbol of the fad-following, trivial, young teens that the song parodies. In fact, if "Ondrya" Wolfson heard the song "Valley Girl," she'd probably think it was "cute" too and go around imitating it the same way she'd buy a miniskirt or a new pair of jeans at the Galleria.
The wide-spread and familiarity of "Valley Girl" has for better or worse made the single a novelty classic. And unfortunately, it is the kind of record you'd play for your children 20 years from now to show them what growing up in the 80's was really like.