Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 26
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text-itself suggests one of the greatest black jazz musicians ever:
Louis Armstrong. Such a potential allusion is underscored by the fact
that Louie is the only character in the film given a Western name.
He even sings in a throaty and raspy voice reminiscent of Armstrong
and employs scatting, one of Armstrong's trademarks. Moreover, as
Thomas St. John points out, members of Disney's staff were no
strangers to caricatures of Armstrong.'^ Although Louie's voice is
actually dubbed in by a famous white jazz singer, Louis Prima, it is
nevertheless true that Prima is singing within a genre rightfully
attributed to African-American musicians and composers and that he
himself was heavily influenced by Armstrong.
Louie's song—also absent from Disney's source—is equally
symptomatic of the subhuman nature traditionally attributed to
African-Americans: his words, "I want to be like you," convey an
unquenchable envy of Mowgli and therefore ironically reveal how
unlike Mowgli monkeys and orangutans are. When Louie sings, "Now
I'm the King of the Swingers, oh, the jungle VIP; I've reached the top
and had to stop and that's what's botherin' me," he suggests by
implication that he has reached the acme of development within the
black community and that complete [further] development can only
take the form of assimilation—i.e., of becoming fully "white" and
human like Mowgli. Louie may blithely call Mowgli "cousin," but
the term becomes a euphemism in light of the unbridgeable social and
racial chasm between them.^ (In fact, the term "cousin" is itself a
significant retraction of the monkeys' more confident proclamation of
Mowgli as a "blood-brother" (34) in Kipling's tale. One wonders
whether the term was changed to avoid the more offensive
implication of closer kinship.) It is, significantly, only King Louie
who expresses dissatisfaction with his condition in Disney's The
Jungle Book. Whether inadvertently or not, Louie's words convey an
echo of the desperate and futile efforts by blacks to be accepted by
white society, efforts which historically went to such lengths as
painfully conking (i.e., straightening) their hair, bleaching their
skin, and even surgically altering their features (a la Michael
Jackson).^ When Louie sings, "I want to stroll right into town and be
just like the other men," he illustrates this desire to integrate, a
desire that exactly replicates the historical plight of blacks under
the laws of segregation. Louie's lyrics are, moreover, entirely
Disney's invention; they are a far cry from the inveterate boasting