Originally published at: Nostalgia: Frank and Moon Zappa's 'Valley Girl' | Boing Boing
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zappa really was an asshole but he could be such an incredibly entertaining asshole that, unless you were personally the object of his scorn, you could kind of overlook it. he was also an incredibly talented and dedicated musician. he had the gifts but he also had the persistence to practice and stretch musically. he was also a fine producer. his opposition to tipper gore’s hearings and philosophy was a joy at points but somewhat painful too.
for very different reasons of course, my feelings about zappa are akin to my feelings about wagner. both were great composers and musicians as well as being great showmen but as human beings they fell very short.
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i had forgotten how Zappa-sounding that song was – i remember it as being much lighter and poppier, and about a minute and a half shorter.
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Well, to be fair here, Moon didn’t write the song, Frank wrote it based on stuff he’d heard her saying, and the band recorded it and Frank had Moon come in and improvise some ad-libs over it afterwards. So a collaborative effort at best.
I’m sure Frank was very proud of Moon, and that some of what he hurled at Warhol was based on their mutual dislike of each other.
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Gail Zappa seems like a decent sort, according to this story about a nervous journalist assigned to interview Moon at the height of the “Valley Girl” craze.
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Could easily be said of his whole catalog
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There’s some Zappa I really like - The Yellow Shark, London Symphony, Uncle Meat, Hot Rats - but dammit, 75% of the time when he opened his mouth something misogynist, homophobic, or racist came out. It got passed-off as satire, but songs like I Have Been in You or Bobby Brown Goes Down or any part at all of Thing-Fish don’t have much to do with social critique, they’re musical junk food designed to get a rise out of people Frank thought were too uptight.
The years have not been kind to a lot of his catalog, but most of that stuff didn’t play that well back in the ‘80s either.
I will admit to having a nostalgic affection for Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch. It was the first Zappa record I ever heard and I Come From Nowhere changed my ideas about what a guitar rock could sound like.
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Valley Girl . Oh my god.
You would have thought that radio was trying to power itself by playing it every 10 minutes for months on end.
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Is was 15 and living in the Valley when this came out. I was horrified and made certain I did away with any evidence of a Valley Girl accent I may have had at the time.
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Made a cut up montage for a music project at an Australian university. Had a friend from the US do a ‘Valley Girl’ improv over the top. The overwhelming criticism of the piece was the accent was not authentic and an offensive caricature of American women?!
It was very authentic. The story I heard was that the whole sound came from the SoCal surfers. The surfers would get congested while surfing and in turn have a nasally twang to their voice. The Valley Girl accent sounds a lot like old surfer talk. Different words same inflection and tone.
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