A pop face pulled until the features will not sit
The breakbeat is indecently tight, a hip-hop chassis with the bolts showing, and then the melody smears, too sweet, too close, a tune that might be a love song if the love song had started to melt. Richard D. James, as Aphex Twin, spends the first minutes of Windowlicker letting you think you have put on a sleek single. The drums are the sleekness. The harmony is the joke, except it is not only a joke. It is gorgeous in a way that makes gorgeousness uncomfortable, which is his particular weather. Voices, pitched and cut, chatter at the edges. The track is long for a pop song and short for the unease it keeps renewing.
Warp released it in March 1999, James producing it himself, a single with Formula on the back, in the season when his face had become a brand he could distort. The title is British slang, ugly on purpose, a word for someone who stares and licks at a pane. He chose it the way he chose many titles, for the rub. Chris Cunningham’s video took the rub and made it a six-minute commercial from a worse channel: a limousine, women, a beach, and then the faces, James’s grin multiplied until beauty and the grin are the same prosthetic. Cunningham has described the job as pushing the language of the hip-hop video until it became horror and advertising at once. The record did not need the pictures to be disturbing. It helped. Together they made a hit that felt like a dare you had already accepted by pressing play.
On radio the edit tried to civilize a track that is about the failure of civilizing. In clubs the break was enough, and people danced the sleek part while the melt happened over their heads. James has never been a reliable explainer. He has said, in the years around the single, that he liked making things that sounded accessible and then were not, a hip-hop shape with the wrong ghost inside. The ghost is the melody. You can hum it. Humming it feels like agreeing to something you have not read. That is the design, and it is why the song outlasted the shock of the video. The video dated into a known outrage. The drums did not date.
It’s nothing to do with Richard. It’s totally me. Richard’s involvement consisted of sitting on the beach opposite the filming and playing chess.
(Chris Cunningham, NME, 1999)
What the funk conceals is how little comfort the funk is offering. A window licker, in the slang, is a cruelty. Putting that cruelty on a beautiful break is not a protest song and not a prank that ends. It is James’s habit of making the listener complicit, the same habit as the grin in the video, which you laugh at and then notice you are still looking. The single’s success, a real chart presence for a record this bent, proved the complicity was popular. He did not soften the next records to chase it. The chase had already happened, in the first bars, when you thought you knew what kind of song this was.
What remains is the melt. Windowlicker still starts like a gift and continues like a test. The slang in the title has not become kinder. The break has not become less physical. Between them is the reason the track still feels current: a pop song that tells you, with excellent rhythm, that the face you came to see will not sit still.
