[M-Mu] The "Asian Cake" Mystery, and Japanese Exclusivity

There's been an alleged track on an album that's bugged me for quite a long time at this point, a blemish on my (admittedly extremely janky) music library, and it has to do with a weird discrepancy around the band "Cake". Allow me to throw you down a little rabbit hole for a few minutes...



Showroom of Compassion is an album released by Cake in 2011, and on most releases it has 11 tracks, starting with Federal Funding, and ending with Italian Guy. Now, for some physical releases, you often get Deluxe Editions that give some bonus tracks, maybe some instrumentals, perhaps a demo or two. Irritatingly though, you also have to be careful of...Japan.

This is a Japanese copy of Weezer (The Green Album, we have to always put this in parentheses because for some reason all of our albums are just called Weezer) that perpetually bugs me with it's existence. You see, the original release of this album was in 2001, and only had 10 tracks. This however, has twelve...and released in 2006. Why ?



The article I will link below explains it in far more detail if you're curious, but to simplify, Japan has been doing this since the era of the CD to try and incentivize people to buy local copies at a higher price with more elusive and "complete" content, because of high manufacturing costs for CDs. If there's any album you love that had a worldwide release, there's a very good chance the Japanese copy has an extra track near the end.

https://loudwire.com/why-japanese-bonus-tracks-exist-explained/



But, Showroom of Compassion doesn't have this problem...allegedly. There seems to be no record of a Japanese release actually, but there's a mysterious "Asian" release that couldn't have come from Japan, as it doesn't have the iconic obi strip with kanji on any of the scans, like other Japanese releases. But I want to raise an extra confusing question; What's the difference between "01 - Federal Funding" and "12 - Federal Funding March" ?



Well, do a bit of digging, and you'll find that it was likely the same song, just paced differently, less echo, and more brass. Also named very slightly differently ? Not confusing at all. Hey, even looks like it was released under a vinyl boxset...but, that comes with it's own problem too...

Right okay, right, so the official release they're still selling has a mass misprint issue, meaning even that isn't comprehensive, because it's missing a critical song, the same song that's apparently only on one Asian copy of the album that I seriously question the existence of. Don't you just, LOVE having music locked away under regional exclusivity and collector's editions ? Isn't this just a great industry and standard we have ?



At least this hunt reminded me that the B-Sides album exists, even though this whole hunt has left me with more questions than answers. Cake is a pretty alright band that frequently gets a soft recommendation from me, the kind I feel others would probably appreciate more than me, but I'm also often more positive than negative towards general music. At the very least, Comfort Eagle is worth a try.



My summary is I hate region exclusivity, album variations, and when tracks are held back (yes I know Polygondwanaland ain't a case of this, I just find the reason behind this stupid Discogs listing funny), and almost nobody will care about these kind of things but me. Oh well. Tune in next week for whatever music thing I complain about, because I guess this is a weekly thing now. Or maybe it won't be, who knows. Maybe it won't be complaining, maybe I'll just write about what I choose. Music is interesting.

(2023-5-22 Update: Fixed broken Imgur links, migrated to imgbb, and added [M-Mu] tag)