Songfacts®:

• Released February 23, 1999 on an eponymous single, "Windowlicker" was NME's 1999 Single of the Year in its year-end charts.
  
  The title could be a reference to the term "window licker," which has been used in the past as a derogatory name for someone with mental disability. It could also reference the French term for window shopping (a phrase used to denote the action of picking up passing women) - "faire du lèche-vitrine" - which translates literally as "licking the window."
• The track begins with the main melodic motif, and James' vocals pitched down. It then enters a chopped and screwed percussive section, before the main motif and James' vocal melodies enter with the main refrain. Over the course of the track, these elements and others are manipulated with increasing intensity.
• The full music video contains a 4-minute opening segment in which two men try in vain to pick up a pair of women, before Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) arrives in a 38-window stretch limo and starts dancing. The whole video is a parody of contemporary American gangsta hip-hop music videos - in this segment there is an average of a profanity every two seconds.
  
  The single artwork and music video follow a motif found in much of James' work, in which his own face replaces those of others. This was achieved using masks and makeup rather than digital graphics. Chris Cunningham created the artwork and directed the video.
• In 2000, the track was nominated for the Brit Award for Best British Video, but lost to Robbie Williams' ice-skating themed video for "She's The One."
• A spectrogram of the track reveals a spiral at the end of the song. This was achieved using MetaSynth, a program allowing the user to insert a digital image as the spectrogram.
• Beatboxer and comedian Beardyman covered the track, using just his voice and looping samplers, at his 2009 performance at Edinburgh Comedy Festival.
• Dutch multi-instrumentalist Binkbeats covered the track as part of Boiler Room's "Beats Unraveled" series, in 2014.