It’s the Strokes’ best album, it has been out 17 years, I could recite the track list from memory, I’m not blind and I’m practically 30 – but until Wednesday night I thought the image on the cover of Is This It showed a gloved hand resting on a knee.



Yes I’ve seen a knee in real life. I’ve also seen a bare ass. Can I tell them apart? I thought so. Then I read the interview with Colin Lane on his best photograph, the cover of the Strokes’ 2001 debut. He mentioned “the ass shot” and I thought: what ass shot?

I scrolled back to the image at the top. Looked again, hard, at the photo I thought I knew. And something about the way I saw the world shifted. It was like that optical illusion of the rabbit and the duck. I see asses everywhere now, where before I saw knees.

I consider myself a Strokes fan, too, in that absentminded, fond way in which you think about bands that soundtracked your university days. But even those past-midnight plays of Last Nite – as predictable a part of any uni party as a girl sobbing over the debate team member with James Spader hair – did not reflect my nostalgia. When Is This It was released I was 10. My introduction to the Strokes was finding their second album, Room on Fire, in a bargain bin when I was 14 or 15.

Back then, my search for new music occurred mostly on YouTube, the music blog aggregator the Hype Machine, and the filesharing wild west of LimeWire and Kazaa: a hopeful fumble, its success entirely dependent on the accuracy and meticulousness of other users’ file labelling. I downloaded, and occasionally unwittingly accepted, albums with scrambled track listings, or those cobbled together from demos and live versions.

I last remember buying a CD in 2007. Since then my collection and consumption of music has been increasingly digital – with the advent of Spotify, exclusively so.

The musical wild west ... Scrolling through LimeWire. Photograph: Marka/Alamy

I still know some songs best as the rough cut rather than the album version, simply because the internet coughed that up first. For reasons never explained, many songs on LimeWire proved to be a short audio clip of Bill Clinton. Searching for the Strokes, you were just as likely hear Fall Out Boy or a former president denying “sexual relations with that woman” – and so you could forget about album artwork.

The reason I mistook the ass on Is This It for a knee is that, before Wednesday night, I’d probably never seen it writ larger than a thumbnail, let alone 12cm square on a CD. There would have been zero room for ambiguity (one hopes) blown up on a vinyl LP sleeve – but these are essentially fetish objects, prioritised by a very small portion of the music-buying market.

The fact that some of us love albums we can’t accurately describe the cover of speaks to something that has been lost in the way we engage with music today. We can access more than we could ever dream of listening to, yet physically – or even on our hard drives – most of us have little to show for it. Already the superficial investment encouraged by streaming services is shifting the dominant whole from tight, cohesive albums to expansive, mutable playlists. The desire for a tangible object, a piece of art to hold, is frequently cited as a driving force of the so-called “vinyl revival”. But I haven’t bought any of my favourite albums, though I pay Spotify £9.99 a month to listen to them all.

In hindsight, the hours I spent as a teenager curating my iTunes library – down to painstakingly changing encoded genre tags from “alt-rock” to “alt-country” to better reflect Neko Case’s post-1997 oeuvre – seem quaint and obsessive. But tracking down the album versions and correcting those track listings at least required some investment. I was putting the work in. Pedantic and mostly pointless work, yes – but it was a better symbolic match of the artists’ investment than my skating over Spotify today.

The ass shot was Colin Lane’s favourite photo. His ex-girlfriend doubtless still dines out on it. Julian Casablancas and his bandmates surely laboured over the decision to make it the cover of their debut. And all that time, I thought it was of a knee. Maybe that says something (wholesome? Troubling?) about me. Or maybe it says something about how superficially we now engage with music and art, even that which has been crafted and laboured over. Even the Strokes’ best track – the one that goes “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.