H Jungle with t -- GOING GOING HOME

From reading my article on H Jungle with t's "WOW WAR TONIGHT" from 2018, I think you will know my feelings on that particular song. It wasn't a favourite of mine under any circumstances but obviously I was in the minority since it was one of the biggest hits of 1995 (No. 1 in the Oricon weeklies for several weeks and No. 2 for the entire year).

About a few months after the release of "WOW WAR TONIGHT", comedian Masatoshi Hamada（浜田雅功）and producer/songwriter Tetsuya Komuro（小室哲哉）decided to aim for another single, and in July, "GOING GOING HOME" was released. Again, this was another song that got a lot of heavy billing on TV but because of my feelings for that first single, I didn't really pay Single No. 2 by H Jungle with t too much attention.

Strangely enough, though, on hearing it again after so many years, "GOING GOING HOME" didn't force me to scrunch up my face. The experience wasn't actually too bad with that light reggae beat and a more pleasant arrangement. It was enough that I could even withstand H's delivery this time around.

I couldn't find the original music video for "GOING GOING HOME" but I remember seeing it in the ads, and according to an interview in the magazine "Bart" via J-Wiki, although Hamada and Komuro were going to shoot it against a green screen of a tropical island, it was decided to actually head over to Managaha Island located near Saipan, a popular resort for many Japanese.

In addition, according to that same interview, Hamada had apparently thought that "GOING GOING HOME" was so much more complex to sing than "WOW WAR TONIGHT" that at one point he ended up going going home in a huff but obviously cooler heads prevailed and the song got recorded. Incidentally, although the melody and the title had intimated that the tune was all about making that long way to the hearth and family, the lyrics were actually about returning to the woman you love and perhaps realizing that she was being taken for granted.

"GOING GOING HOME" didn't enjoy as much fame as "WOW WAR TONIGHT". It scored a No. 2 ranking in the Oricon weeklies and became the 20th-ranked single for 1995. As a source of Western Japanese pride, it has also been placed alongside BORO's "Osaka de Umareta Onna"（大阪で生まれた女）and Masaki Ueda's（上田正樹）"Osaka Bay Blues" as a song infusing plenty of strong Kansai dialect through Hamada's singing, according to an article in the music magazine "WHAT's IN?". Finally from my vantage point, who would have thought that the really loudmouth half of the popular comedic duo Downtown would end up having two Top 20 hits within the same year?