Grody (Zappa)

 Overture from the Mamas and the Papas.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVgcdq3uceQ

One of the most sublime pop songs ever performed by the Mamas and the Papas, arguably one of their greatest, is a song about Valley girls called ‘Twelve Thirty (Young Girls are coming to the Canyon)’ (1967).   It was never a big hit. Oddly, the only Top Forty hit of the even more prolific Frank Zappa was an unsublime novelty song called ‘Valley Girl’ (1982), all about the idiolect of Valley girls in California, known as Valley Speak. For this reason, for some people, the most famous word in the Zappa lexicon is ‘grody’, used by Moon Unit Zappa near the end of the song in the line “Grody to the max.” When I first noticed grody over ten years ago I wrote innocently, “Grody has not travelled beyond the shores of North America. You will not hear this word in the streets of Melbourne, though gross is a close synonym.” At that time I quarried the Urban Dictionary, where the word was added as late as 2002, thus: “Nasty, dirty, disgusting, foul, revolting, yucky.” The example sentence: “Are you sure you want to eat that Chinese food? It looks all grody.” The compilers conjectured that it was an Americanised pronunciation of the British word grotty. The Free Dictionary traced usage to the mid-1960s, where grody was an adjective meaning “Repellent, dirty, disgusting, sleazy, seedy.” There is even the comparative grodier and superlative grodiest. Zappa’s lyric reaches for the superlative of grody, if not further. It’s a piece of social satire about indulged Valley girls that doesn’t bear relistening. Revisiting grody this weekend I find, to my surprise, that the Online Etymology Dictionary states it is a variant of grotty, then confusingly a slang shortening of grotesque. Grody “had a brief vogue in 1964 as part of the argot popularized by the Beatles in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’,” which explains a lot; we recall that Paul’s dodgy grandfather was a very clean man. Paul was possibly though unaware that the word “unconsciously echoes Middle English ‘groti’ “muddy, slimy”, from Old English grotig “earthy”, from grot “particle””, according to the Dictionary, which raises the question of when something is grotesque, a word derived from Italian not Old English, and when something is grotty. Ask a Valley Girl, I guess. She will tell you when the clothes from that shop are grotesque, or grotty, or both, and why having to wash the dishes for your mother, dishes with stuff that sticks to the plates and it’s like other people’s food and y’know it’s like grody, grody to the max.   

 

This is the second of a series of essays on the words of Frank Zappa dedicated to The Hard Listening Group.

Unit (Zappa)

Moon is a name in many cultures and the moon inspires moon names, but Moon is quite uncommon in the Anglosphere. It is a truth we hold to be self-evident that more Americans name their child Bronwyn than Moon. While the moon is one of the supreme objects of poetic attention and expression, poetry is not the first thing we think of when we meet someone called Moon. Why is that? There is no reason to think Moon unpoetic and with time it comes to have its own grandeur. We would generally expect Moon to be a girl’s name, though there is no argument against calling a boy Moon.

Unit is more unusual than Moon, as a name. When Frank and Gail Zappa named their first child Moon Unit it was at a time when international attention was trained closely on the Apollo Space program. NASA launched a whole range of new terms straight into the language, but undoubtedly one that has stuck is lunar module (LM). A lunar module was the lander part of the moonshot spacecraft, designed to descend to the surface of the moon and, after the spacemen had done their day’s work, ascend again. A unit is a self-contained autonomous body, like many modules, and perhaps Frank and Gail noticed with delight what humans see when their child arrives: the child is a singular individual. Most people would not name their child Unit because, again, it is not common and not to be found in any baby name book. It also has a mathematical or statistical air, counting things out in units. It is impersonal, indeed is a consumer capitalist term denoting mass production and currency exchange, which is not the way humans perceive the uniqueness of their own children. Yet curiously, by calling their daughter Unit they conferred unique status on her anyway. Maybe that was the idea.

The name has all the hallmarks of the age. It is both an expression of hippie freakout and an acknowledgement of the vast American technological advance being felt in 1967. The name is a statement of difference, both bohemian and scientific. Moon Unit reminds us of the Circle and the Square, those two basic shapes of everyday life, of the flat circular vinyl record being placed onto the turntable, and of the square record player unit the turntable revolves on.  There is some crackle from the speaker and then the music begins.   

This is the first of a series of essays on the words of Frank Zappa dedicated to The Hard Listening Group.