Nits and the Girls

Now, Nits stand out in the pop music scene in quite a few ways, but perhaps one of their more striking singularities is that they don’t particularly seem to be known for their sex appeal (correct me ladies if I’m wrong…). Their music is more often sensual and has, almost never, a sexual undertone. It goes together with the more subtle, veiled nature of their music, with more of a cerebral, introvert character to it, rather than being of a physical, outgoing and direct nature. I think they were at their sexiest on the Wool album, with many girls around on stage for a change, and the music having this very sensuous, almost feminine vibe to it. Henk’s performance of songs like “Angel of Happy Hour” and “The Strawberry Girl” on the dvd recording of Wool shows this more sensual side of him he certainly possesses. The seriousness in his concentration sometimes broken by a cracking or tender smile ( the koala faces-smile on “The Strawberry Girl” – check it out) can melt our hearts for sure, but in a more delicately sensitive way, the fire-in-my-head-way. Pop music however has this very intimate and natural connection with all things sexual; it is one of the idiosyncrasies that sets Nits apart from the mainstream of the pop music culture and maybe also one of the reasons why their audiences remain somewhat on the smaller side. Nits’ world is more one of Ice Princesses than of Roxannes. But then came along this fancy, fresh, charming girl from the Swiss Mountains (on ISNT NITS), called Heidi Happy, who decided to hot things up a bit. And she made this frivolous, lace and chandelier version of Nescio with an extended Italian intermezzo with a moustache(?!) – that’s where the moustache in my previous text came from,( I didn’t remember at first why I wrote that). And then there’s this other important issue Nits almost never seem to touch on: LOVE. Henk seems to have overlooked this most precious topic that is on everyone’s mind, except on his apparently (The Milkman being one obvious exception, but again written from a distant third person’s perspective) and pop music’s number one subject, almost in an obsessive way. The Nits universe sometimes resembles this “childlike”, ingenuous, innocent pre-love world without all its well-known complications. It is the sweetness of a love that embraces all things, everything and everyone, and does not know of heartbreak and evil. It’s the love of a world in its entirety, a love that is not individualised yet, not restricted, not exclusive, not a “free” love either. I think it is precisely this remarkable and exceptional vision of love (certainly in the pop universe) that could explain the absence of an erotic sexuality in the Nits world. In a way it resembles the views on love of the Dutch-born philosopher Spinoza, who describes love as the enjoyment of a thing (or a person) and the union with it. That’s the feeling I get wandering around in the world of Nits, this happy embracing of our surroundings. It’s like walking around in a world and seeing things, experiencing things that make us happy and make us fall in love with a whole world. With Nits, love is in the symbiotic relationship they form with nature, with their surrounding world full of objects, people, art, tables and chairs, and all kinds of – to use an ugly word – other stimuli, and with music of course. The only downside of this love being melancholy… The sweetheart girl with the moustache certainly chose a good name to fall in love with, “Heidi Happy”…

Joke Roelandt, May 2018