Frank Zappa put a subversive face on tricky jazz-rock fusion, collaborated with the L.A. Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra, and worked with classical figures from Zubin Mehta to Pierre Boulez...
Bitchin', right?
Twenty years on from his death, Zappa might roll over and gag himself with a spoon in his grave if he were to know that "Valley Girl" remained his most enduring public legacy.
Before he died on Dec. 4, 1993, the counterculture icon shared plenty of feelings about the deathlessness of his biggest hit, some of them more gnarly than tubular.
"The worst thing about that record is the fact that nobody really listened to it," he told critical supporter Josef Woodard. "The whole coverage of the song barely mentioned what the song was really saying, that these people are really airheads." On another occasion, he waxed even less enthusiastic about how his song was embraced: "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."
Yet at other times he seemed to relish the attention "Valley Girl" had afforded him and his collaborator on the single, 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit Zappa. He decried the fact that, despite its ubiquity, the song had sold "maybe 350,000 copies," but added, "sociologically, it was the most important record of 1982 in the United States."
Overstatement? Maybe not. (And what are you going to pit against it for that title — "White Wedding"?) Linguistically, at least, it was the most significant piece of music of the decade, satirizing and/or popularizing the "Val-speak" that both delighted and horrified a nation. It wasn't just the lingo, but the then-newfangled teen way of intoning every declarative statement so that it sounds like a question.
Lost in the hysteria over Moon Unit's contributions was the fact that it started with a hell of a riff, one that Zappa had been "piddling with" at sound checks for a year before he decided it would be the thunderous undertone to a piece of savage mockery of his daughter's contemporaries.
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