Frank Zappa wrote his most throwaway song in 1982 and scored a hit

Frank Zappa’s 1982 song ‘Valley Girl’ became a radio hit, despite his view that it was deliberately lightweight and lacked meaningful content. The story presents the song’s success as an unlikely fit for an artist who valued authenticity and resisted writing to please the mainstream.

Zappa said radio stations would play the track because listeners could have “a little laugh” without receiving real information. He saw radio’s preference for such material as evidence of an “anti-information syndrome”. The article also cites ‘Flower Punk’, his earlier attack on the flower power movement, as another example of his criticism of popular trends.