Fifty-two shapes of Nits: The fifty-first shape is the face

Faces of Nits: The Shape of Humaneness

“I Will Try To Frame Your Face – I Will Try To Speak Your Name”

The work of Nits is full of faces. Not only on certain album covers like the ones of IN THE DUTCH MOUNTAINS and HENK, but even more importantly in the lyrical writing of Henk Hofstede. And then there is of course the exceptional video for their song “Mask”. It’s not just a gorgeous thing to watch and perfectly in sync with the song, it has the stature of yet another kind of “manifesto” of Nits’ artistic intentions. Remember how Nits insert themselves into this long line of humanists? This is quite an exceptional thing for pop musicians, but Nits easily qualify thanks to their pictorial, literary, poetic, philosophical and people-loving way of making music. Just like that, and with hardly anyone noticing, Nits have constructed a sort of musical art that is setting out the pillars of our being, much in the manner of many a great thinker or artist, and they achieve this in the most unintellectual way possible. Yet their ways are so effective and, most of all, exquisitely beautiful and revelatory. There are faces in a song about a Bauhaus chair, faces reflected in the mirrors of rooms in houses, faces in costumed plays, faces in the song featuring a mask, there’s a face amidst clouds in the sky, faces in war scenes, photographed faces,… It is easy to see how Nits make portraits of people in quite a traditional way, I mean people portrayed accompanied by those very peculiar attributes that one also commonly finds in the work of many a “classical” portraitist who loves to paint his subjects surrounded by some favourite objects. This pictorial art is also the art of the music of Nits … without a doubt!

In the “Mask” video, the chosen attribute that will accompany the portraits of the musicians and non-musicians alike is the old-fashioned Dutch windmill. The good-natured portrait of a people, of a community. There are abundant smiles, an occasional tear, frowns, pensive faces, open-mouthed laughter, eyes, mouths, teeth, glasses, a whimsical wink of the eye… And they all don’t just stand in a no-man’s-land; no, there are meadows and a little river or canal, low skies, flat lands and perhaps even a cow. It’s the portrait of a world and the people living in it. And music is its frame. It’s as fundamental as that, the art of Nits.

There’s something about the song “In a Play (Das Mädchen im Pelz)” that keeps pulling me into its world and melody. There’s something essential in there that never stops fascinating me, and I have often wondered what that is. Especially those stunning verses “I will try to frame your face – I will try to speak your name” move me every time I listen to the song. Something is expressed here by Henk Hofstede which, when I think about it, captures the state of mind of the lyricist, and even the leitmotif behind the musical art of Nits. It’s the theme of “the other”, the other person one meets in the world, the encounter with another human presence, reaching out towards the other and then … often becoming aware of this distance that is always part of otherness. This recalls Emmanuel Levinas for whom the face of the other exceeds every image, description, role or category we might want to impose upon it. The play where the actors die … but where only genuine faces play themselves … perhaps? But Henk Hofstede says “I will try”. The artist wishes to capture the other person’s presence and meaning, but realises that the other person will always escape complete representation. This humility on the part of the lyricist is particularly meaningful. The humaneness of the artist resides perhaps most of all in their willingness to keep trying despite the possibility of failure. The attempt in itself is an act of affection. There’s no despair involved.

The opening music, suggesting a space that has yet to be filled, seems to invite us into a lush theatre where a scene of classical beauty is about to unfold. The composition of the song, with its elegant melody of emotional restraint, is so beautifully proportioned in all its instrumental elements as if it were imitating a Renaissance portrait. This is so typical of many a Nits composition: Nits organise sounds in a way that resembles the organisation of visual shapes and forms. “In a Play (Das Mädchen im Pelz)” is an exquisite example of this “procedure”. Every instrument plays a different role in the theatrical setting of the song. It is as if the music were striving towards the perfect presentation of past moments in a present of continuous musical remembering. The song brings the portrait of das Mädchen im Pelz to life; it makes her live and breathe within the perfect proportions of remembered moments. The music creates, as it were, a temporal frame around her, allowing us to linger a little longer in the presence of her beauty, and in the beauty of moments once lived and now remembered. The song is tender and magnificent at the same time. There is an exceptional nobility about it, a quality – both ethical and aesthetic – that is characteristic of so many Nits songs. Yes, I would even venture to say that “noble” is perhaps the one adjective that suits Nits better than any other … Nits approach music with the same consideration and dignity they extend to other beings in the world. Theirs is the music of gentlemen, for want of a better word, perhaps even of philanthropists… How profoundly the music seems to be inspired by her face!

I have already pointed out that Nits are not particularly interested in the “ego”, in their personal egos with their preoccupations, worries, suffering, lovesickness … Instead Nits go out into the world to meet others and to try to discover shared perceptions of the world. And not only in the works of the artist or the actor; anyone will do… a miller on the back of a cow or a strawberry girl … animals too, of course, like Rabbit Ho. Throughout their work, Nits spontaneously make this most humane gesture of acknowledging the significance of any human being (or living being) without demanding that they be exceptional. There’s always this affectionate curiosity, which is just as happy to focus on the vaccination mark on someone’s arm as on the exquisite fur in the portrait of a certain lady. Nits are genuinely interested in all these things that they encounter while getting to know the other. It’s the unmistakable mark of the humanist.

Again, Nits tread the natural path of the phenomenologist in emphasising this being-with-others throughout their musical oeuvre. This is what Martin Heidegger calls “Mitsein’” , which is simply a fundamental qualification of our being-in-the world. We are always thrown into this pre-existing community of other beings. The focus on this “evident fact” is what makes the music of Nits so tender, compassionate and, above all, humane. Nits are a family, a community of beings with eyes wide open to each other and to the world and its inhabitants, even the imagined ones. Once again, under the mask that signifies the distance between two people, there is a face, eyes, a mouth that can make contact with the other, there are ways of getting closer to one another in one brotherhood and sisterhood of men and women. And music and musicians are the perfect symbol of this coming together, playing together, living together. This is not cheesy, and Nits are almost never cheesy – perhaps I must allow for one moment in “Moved by Her”, with the mouse and its hole … – nor are they sentimental. They have mankind’s best interests at heart: this is such an obvious characteristic of their work, this kindness, this humanity …

Nits are not merely passers-by when they venture out on the road into the world; they linger a little longer, they try to see behind, beyond the surface, they try to frame the faces they meet, standing still before them, contemplating them while trying to preserve their memory; they take the faces of the world around them and give them shape and meaning through the act of looking and remembering, through the art of making music. Hence all those photographs that wander around in the Nits world, testimonies to a past and present that we want to hold onto and cherish, faces that we – Nits – don’t want to be forgotten. This forms the concrete foundation of the melancholy of Nits: the disappearance of faces that were once so alive and meaningful, the disappearance of a familiar world. As if the whole purpose of their music were an attempt to rescue a human presence from disappearance. Nits go out on the road to capture and remember. People and faces. Their music becomes almost a tool for framing faces.

Some of their most iconic songs revolve around faces. In the fabulous “The Bauhaus Chair”, while turning back the pages with photographs, we are left to notice that all the faces and houses we see pictured there are fading and will eventually disappear. All the friends that we have made … The connection with others is ultimately what makes our lives worthwhile. And then … what makes everything even more poignant and touching is how Henk Hofstede reminisces about a chair, the Bauhaus Chair, to express his sorrow and feelings of loss and want. What is missed is a concrete person in a concrete setting, a lived-in world that we humans share with the objects around us, in houses where roofs and walls protect us, where we come together, live together, sheltered both by a community and by stones and other material things that provide us with comfort. It’s just such a simple image, which Henk Hofstede expresses time and time again with such beauty and understatement. Quite literally, really; he uses the bricks and the mortar, the eyes and the faces. Nevertheless, he succeeds in portraying a world of enormous humaneness, a sensitivity to the vulnerability of humankind, to the fact that so many meaningful, albeit little things and ordinary faces that played no particularly significant role in the history of mankind are somehow of the utmost importance in our lives, the faces that were part of the houses we lived in, faces we saw in the mirrors of our rooms, in the streets and towns we visited.

This melancholy invested in the human face is what makes many a Nits song stand out in the universe of pop songs. Das Mädchen im Pelz is just one of them. And Hofstede even pledges that he will also try to speak her name. Your name, my name. And that’s exactly what he achieves: speaking the language of the beings we all are. The name of the one he encounters. Trying to capture the enormity of the world that hides in each face, behind the name of each and every one of us. The image of a shared world, shared sensibilities. This Levinasian way of looking at the other is what turns the musical universe of Nits into one of the most humane in the entire pop kingdom. The face reminds us that our world was never ours alone; we are in it together. I have never heard any other song that professes to miss an object – a chair – in such a beautiful and meaningful way, just tying everything together, the bond between people, a whole experience of the world and life coming together in the image of a chair! Such perfectly wise, natural and intelligent poetry. And the melody: it goes out to meet all the faces, the friends … and holds them connected and alive for ever in its living notes. Nits create a musical language as a clear expression of “Miteinandersein”, “being-with-one-another”. It’s not like in the Monkees’ song “I’m a Believer” – “Then I saw her face” – it’s not a mere infatuation, although presented in a fabulous song. Nits take it a little further: it’s a simple and straightforward way of honouring and acknowledging the existence of the other. Nor is it like the Turtles’ song “Happy Together” – although, again, this is an extraordinary song and I can see how it inspired the work of Nits, with its happiness in sound and meaning, its perfect melody… But the latter take it further and deeper, encompassing a togetherness that should be an evident way of being-together-in-the-world, not just for two people in love, but for a whole world in love…

Nits broke the original mould of pop and set the scene for an all-embracing way of opening up the pop realm into a musically philosophical view of the interactions between people and their world, characterised by respectfulness and humaneness, and in their idiosyncratic musical language Nits often remind us of a certain sweet strand of earlier days of pop, with its messages of love and peace. Nits inherited some of the communal aspirations of earlier pop music and translated them into their own artistic language. They transformed and expanded this particular tradition of optimistic, affectionate and idealistic pop of the sixties. A tradition of friendly faces continued …

“Amsterdam Dreaming”, on such an autumn day.

All the leaves are brown – And the sky is grey – I’ve been on a walk – On an autumn day …. Sounds familiar?

If you’re going to Amsterdam – You’re gonna meet some gentle people there

A world of monkees, turtles, beatles, mamas and papas and … wearing flowers in your hair.

All these sixties songs are among my favourites too …

This young pop music paved the way for a bright explosion of music in a much-underrated genre, which would then bring decades more of ingenious creations, often reflecting changes in society or different and new sensibilities, and producing songs that I have often thought expertly capture the atmosphere of living in the moment at a particular time. Pop music at its best can deliver an incredible experience in which music gives us the feeling that it knows all there is to know about the mystery of you and me, of life and world. All we need to do is listen.

“In the mirrors of this house – I’ve seen your face a thousand times or more” is the opening line of another iconic faces-of-Nits song.

Its beauty and meaning never fail to send shivers down my spine.

Joke Roelandt, October 2016