“Valley Girl” by Moon Unit Zappa

"Valley Girl" put Moon Unit Zappa's voice on the radio in 1982 when she was 14, riffing in pitch-perfect San Fernando Valley slang over a hard, jerky guitar figure her father Frank had written. It came off his 35th album, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, the only single from it, on Barking Pumpkin, and father and daughter share the writing credit. It started because Moon wanted to work with her dad; as the story goes, Frank got her out of bed in the dead of night, brought her to a studio and had her act out the chatter she traded with her pals.

Frank meant it as a sneer at Valley teen culture and insisted it wasn't a happy song, but the joke backfired and ended up popularizing the very stereotype it mocked. It reached number 32 on the Hot 100 and drew a Grammy nomination.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.