Hideki Saijo -- Hop! Step! Jump! （ホップ・ステップ・ジャンプ）

No connection to the article but I did want to show
Noelle the donut indulgence I experienced last weekend.

Happy Canada Day to all! My home nation is celebrating its 148th birthday today as it always does on July 1st, and so after walking around downtown Toronto all afternoon, I'm quite relieved to rest my dogs and sit in front of an open roaring computer screen.

While I was surfing through music163 last night, I came across a compilation album of some of the old kayo. Most of the songs have already been talked about but there were a couple that I had yet to cover. Hideki Saijo's（西城秀樹）"Hop! Step! Jump!" is one of them and I hadn't ever heard it before. This was his 29th single from May 1979 and following his cover of The Village People's "YMCA" which would end up as one of his greatest hits. I'm sure everyone involved was definitely hoping for disco lightning to strike twice since the song sounds like the mystery love child for "YMCA".

Composed by Kimio Mizutani（水谷公生）and written by Hikaru/Ko Yamazaki（山崎光）, the two of them absolutely tapped into that vein of Village People disco when they whipped this one up for Saijo. Heck, there is even similar choreography to "Young Man" as shown below. "Hop! Step! Jump!" got as high as No. 2 on Oricon and became the 29th-ranked song of the year. So it wasn't quite the megahit that "Young Man" was, but it still makes for an interesting follow-up. And here I thought that "Hop! Step! Jump!" was just a lyric from a Yoshie Kashiwabara（柏原芳恵）tune.

Not the real Village People
but the good folks from one of my
favourite programs, the legendary
comedy show "SCTV"