Breaking the Mould of Pop Music: 50 Shapes of Nits

(Work in progress)

In this celebratory Nits year I will take some time to reflect on my favourite band in my own quiet way. There are just about 50 weeks left in this happy new year and I intend to devote a pocket-sized reflection on the singularity of Nits in a series of short Nitswits during the course of the year, as a personal tribute to this most uncommon band of musicians. These Nitswits can be centred around a song, a verse of lyrics, a figurative or visual element, an idea, an instrument … anything really. It’s supposed to be a little corner of deeper ruminations (which should be read slowly) on the work and identity of Nits.

The first Nitswit is titled “Connection”. The first shape is The Bauhaus Chair.

1/50. CONNECTION

This first text reflects on one of the most essential Nits characteristics which makes them stand out in the spectrum of pop music. It’s their interconnectivity with the world of the arts. Music as an invisible art has always been an art form pulling the heart strings easily, its “invisibility” has turned it into one of the most inner-felt forms of art. Nits however have – from very early on in their career – brought the other arts into their music, not as a sort of added show aspect – which is quite popular now in many a pop act – but rather as an intrinsic part or quality of the songs themselves. With Nits this visible aspect is far more natural and subtle. In fact it just connects their music with a whole, natural Lebenswelt. 

All this gets back to the phenomenological nature of the music of Nits: the musicians behave like true phenomenologists, the lyrics writer perhaps most of all. As a visual artist, a painter and draughtsman, Henk Hofstede is used to turning the world into paintings. Painting or drawing forms and colours reveals the simple “there is” of the world, the bare perception of it, perhaps our foremost connection to the world. The ontological priority of “seeing the world” feels quite natural and “seeing” is often our first point of reference. Painting is an embodied vision: the artist lives and inhabits the world that surrounds him, the world he is painting; even more so, he experiences the world from the inside and that’s where music comes in. As the invisible art that it is, music is perfect to interiorise the perception we formed of the world and that is exactly what the music of Nits is capable of doing: giving this outer world an inner dimension through the patient unfolding of sounds of music and words. Nits incorporate all sorts of art forms into their musical universe: from the obvious plastic arts, to architecture, theatre and dance, photography and film, to fashion, design, and poetry and literature. It’s all there. I like it when music is embedded this way in a whole realm of cultural forms. And their music ties everything together so beautifully. The music of Nits always takes the time to look around. A whole world of the senses is drawn into their songs.

This might sound complicated, but it’s not really. The music of Nits is very accessible, easy to appreciate, or so it should be. If only it were played more often on the radio – and I mean not only Nescio or In The Dutch Mountains – all of their work, especially their more recent albums. I’m convinced that if people would hear their music more often, they’d think more about the world, about their own world and the state of it and they’d appreciate the quiet, beautiful little things of life far more.

Henk Hofstede sits down in his world comfortably and in style … in his Bauhaus Chair.