Hoopla - Speech

Welcome to part 2 of 3 of the Speech Japan vs. US series. We've already covered the debut album, of which the differences were pretty easy to identify: the import version had two bonus tracks. It gets just slightly more complicated here, and in this case, the US made out with the better deal as there are 19 tracks on the US release as opposed to 14 on the Japanese version (which is called 1998 Hoopla). If I had to guess why there are such big differences, this is because the US version was released a year after the import However, there are two tracks on the import version that didn't make it to the US release: "I'm Just an MC" and "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child."

The US version has 7 tracks not on the import: "Our Image," "Which Radio Station Has the Guts" (a skit), ""Are You Still With Me" (another skit), "Yeah Yeah," "Shut Down Our Mind Machine, (another skit)" "Redemption Song," and "If Life is a River." There are some fantastic songs in there and three skits, so it was worth waiting a year or so.

For the US fans, here are the songs we didn't get. I particularly like "I'm Just an MC" which samples an old Schoolhouse Rock song if my ears are not deceiving me (which could also explain why we didn't see it here):

I'm Just an MC

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

I'll have to listen to see if there are any differences between the songs as I don't recall- I know on "Spiritual People" there are some different mixes of songs on each album, so that one is a bit more complicated to figure out the differences. Eyeballing things it looks like "Mountain of Lonely" is longer by a minute or so on the import version.