How Louis Theroux became a ‘Jiggle Jiggle’ sensation at 52

STEVEN KURUTZ

Four or five times a week these days, some old friend will contact Louis Theroux and tell him, “My daughter keeps going around the house singing your rap,” or, “My wife was exercising to your rap in her Pilates class.” Passing by a primary school, Theroux has the feeling he is being watched, a sense confirmed when he hears a kid call out behind him: “My money don’t jiggle jiggle.” His agent has been fielding dozens of requests for personal appearances and invitations to perform. Theroux, a 52-year-old British American documentary filmmaker with a bookish, somewhat anxious demeanour, has turned them all down, not least because, as he put it in a video interview from his London home, “I am not trying to make it as a rapper.”

But in a way, he already has: Theroux is the man behind “Jiggle Jiggle,” a sensation on TikTok and YouTube, where it has been streamed hundreds of millions of times. He delivers the rap in an understated voice that bears traces of his Oxford education, giving an amusing lilt to the lines “My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds/I’d like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.”

For Theroux, a son of American author Paul Theroux and a cousin of actor Justin Theroux, the whole episode has been odd and a little unsettling. “I’m pleased that people are enjoying the rap,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a part of me that has a degree of mixed feelings. It’s a bittersweet thing to experience a breakthrough moment of virality through something that, on the face of it, seems so disposable and so out of keeping with what it is that I actually do in my work. But there we are.”

The story of how this middle-aged father of three has taken hold of youth culture with a novelty rap is “a baffling 21st century example of just the weirdness of the world that we live in,” Theroux said. “Jiggle Jiggle” gestated for years before it became all the rage. It started in 2000, when Theroux was hosting “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends,” a BBC Two series in which he delved into various subcultures. For an episode in the third and final season, he travelled to the American South, where he met a number of rappers, including Master P. As part of the show, he decided to do a rap himself, but he had only a few meagre lines: “Jiggle Jiggle/I love it when you wiggle/It makes me want to dribble/Fancy a fiddle?”

He enlisted Reese & Bigalow, a rap duo in Jackson, Mississippi, to help him work it into shape. Bigalow cleaned up the opening lines and linked the word “jiggle” with the word “jingle” to suggest the sound of coins in your pocket. Reese asked him what kind of car he drove. His reply — Fiat Tipo — led to the lines, “Riding in my Fiat/You really have to see it/6-feet-2 in a compact/No slack but luckily the seats go back.”

“Reese & Bigalow infused the rap with a genuine quality,” Theroux said. “The elements that make it special, I could never have written on my own. At the risk of overanalysing it, the genius part of it, in my mind, was saying, ‘My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds.’ There was something very satisfying about the cadence of those words.”

He filmed himself performing the song live on the New Orleans hip-hop station Q93, and BBC viewers witnessed his rap debut when the episode aired in the fall of 2000. That might have been the end of “Jiggle Jiggle” — but “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” got new life in 2016, when Netflix licensed the show and started streaming it on Netflix UK. The rap episode became a favourite, and whenever Theroux made the publicity rounds for a new project, interviewers would inevitably ask him about his hip-hop foray.