My wife’s version is the good version

Over the years, my wife and I have let our CD collections blend into one another. To tell you the truth, it’s mainly my fault. Most of the discs are mine, and I’m not as good at filing things away as she is. But I’m doing my part by getting rid of as many of my records as possible.

A few months ago, I started the rather mammoth task of digitizing my music collection. I’ve been DJing digitally for a few years, and I don’t have much nostalgia for the days of carrying crates of records and CDs to every gig. So I’m ripping as much as I possibly can, and I’m getting rid of all the CDs I’ve successfully ripped.

Admittedly, I’ve been a bit of a perfectionist about it. Some of these CDs are pretty old and damaged, and sometimes they don’t rip properly. The first thing I do once I’ve ripped an album is listen to it all the way through. Most of the time it sounds fine, but sometimes a track has to be ripped again. There are even rare occasions, like a few weeks ago, when I find out I’ve ripped something different than I’d expected.

My wife grew up in the UK, and I grew up in the US record market. We have a lot of the same records, but we don’t necessarily have the same versions of those records. My wife, for example, has the original UK version of Is This It, the debut album by the Strokes, while I’ve got the edited US version, which doesn’t include the song “New York City Cops.”

“Pulled from the US release of Is This It due to the line, ‘New York City cops / They ain’t too smart’—not exactly a popular sentiment in the wake of 9/11—The Strokes’ most infamous song is hardly the incendiary piece of anti-authoritarian polemic it was initially made out to be,” according to the AV Club. “Really, it’s a fairly standard Strokes track, full of typically vague lyrics about leaving a paranoid girlfriend (or, uh, something). In fact, if there’s anything truly offensive about it, it’s that the song—widely hailed as one of the band’s best—was replaced with the middling B-side ‘When It Started,’ denying American audiences the filler-less album that international audiences enjoyed. Thanks, terrorists.”

That’s the song I expected to hear on the subway a few weeks ago, as I got toward the end of the record. iTunes had even played along by downloading the US track listing, and naming the file “When It Started.” But once I actually played the track, I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was really “New York City Cops.”

Hooray! I’d accidentally ripped my wife’s copy of the record! Boy, am I glad I didn’t get rid of the disc afterwards!

By the way, I don’t just want to throw these discs out when I’m done with them, and I’m not really keen to trudge from one used CD shop to another. I think I might look into some online selling options, or at least post a list of the CDs in question on this site and see if there are any takers. Stay tuned for news on this, and feel free to share your recommendations in the comments.

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