Or Would You Prefer a Dishwasher?

Now I don’t know how things happen in your kitchen after a home cooked meal, but I have the impression that in Nits’ kitchen it can be quite a racket at dishwashing time… Not many plates surviving this daily cleansing ritual without getting at least chipped or even broken and I wouldn’t like to be a delicate crystal glass in their kitchen cupboard. Not to mention this annoying fly nervously circling around all the time. Come to think of it: a fly swatter might also come in handy while doing these dirty dishes.

I’ll tell you straight away, Doing the Dishes is my least favourite Nits album, everybody has one, I suppose. My favourite Nits album may vary somewhat perhaps, changing with the time and my mood, but my least favourite one has been a constant, that is, since the advent of Doing the Dishes.

But I remember the time of its release very well. Nits asked us to send in pictures of our own kitchen and our personal dishwashing procedures. I sent in a photo of my one-eyed, black cat Tofu on the kitchen sink, cluttered with dirty plates and a bottle of the famous washing-up liquid Dreft. Unfortunately Tofu died a few years later, but the album survived and lived on, and a few songs still appear regularly, to my dismay, on their concert setlist,“No Man’s Land” and “The Flowers” to name them. These songs enjoy quite some success, I have noticed, but they sound easy, flat and uninteresting to me. They might perhaps fit in more comfortably between more popular tunes played on the radio, probably, but until this day I have been continuously disgruntled by the fact that radio stations (almost) never dare to air some of Nits’ best work. What a shame and what a missed opportunity! With a few notable exceptions though: the show of our fellow Nitsfan Chris Evans and from time to time they get a moment of attention on a Belgian radio station… after hours…

This may sound as a pitiful, female excuse, but I already have a headache from just listening to these songs anew, and I keep on turning down the volume, lower & lower… The guitars sound so harsh as does Henk Hofstede’s voice, shrill and just unpleasant to listen to. The poise and beautiful balance I so adore in their music have evaporated completely. It all exhumes a terribly uncomfortable restlessness that has no real meaning or purpose, and just pushes forward aimlessly. There are of course a few exceptions that allow us to breathe in a more relaxed way for a while, but even those moments don’t convince me. And there seem to be so few free moments to think, to let your thoughts and emotions wander around in their music. I know that all music should be enjoyed principally for what it is, for the beauty or the pleasure its sounds give us, in whatever way, but for me something is off here, something is missing. Everything is just so busy, it feels like going to the supermarket on a Friday evening during rush hour, with your head still full of the week that has just ended, having had no time yet to depressurise… And then thinking that, on top of that, at home, in the kitchen, a heap of dirty dishes is still waiting for you too…

Et pourtant…, the first announcement of the title of what was to be their next abum in a long line of seductive masterpieces, had put me in a confident mood of happy expectancy. Doing the Dishes, yes, as an adept – since my early student days, when I immersed myself in the sort of philosophical theories which looked as if they could be of any use to me in my later life – of phenomenology and its interest for human experience in an unmediated sort of directness, – one of its ’slogans’ being “To the things themselves” – I looked forward to this release and thought it would probably be their most phenomenological record till then. But things turned out to be different than I expected and I was very disappointed. I felt that Nits music had, especially in their more recent albums, developed itself in such closeness to our everyday world and this title seemed to be confirming this idea…  But instead I found myself being woken up somewhat brutally by the clamour in a somewhat noisy kitchen or at a Greek party or wedding where dishes are being thrown and smashed to the floor, so to speak. And it didn’t feel like fun to me… For me this was a dissonant chapter in the Nits historiography.

I found some solace though in a few solitary moments of peace and poetry, as near the ending of “Cowboys and Indians” where Henk quotes the American poet Dickinson “Hope is a strange invention, Emily said…”, very strange indeed… It’s a sweet, melancholic song about lost childhood dreams. Henk writes beautifully about words here as if they embodied the abolition of the imaginative dreams of a young boy; how close childhood friends go their separate ways, how he disappeared from his friend’s life with the last letter of his or her name. Words of reality, words of what is and what isn’t, taking away our childhood fantasies, “There’s no Wild West”. What a beautiful thought…

But there is one song I do like a lot and its memory has stayed with me ever since I first saw it during their Doing the Dishes tour. It’s “Grrr… to You”. It was accompanied by a wonderful video in dark red colours, if I remember well, of a group of people gathered together, on a beach perhaps, – I’m not quite sure -, the images just moving slowly, you couldn’t really make out any details of what you saw, of the people in it, there might have been some sort of a fire too lighting up – or was it just the sun setting? -, it’s all a bit of a blur in my mind now, but I still think of it, see it before my eyes and hear the music. It was one of those moments of beauty Nits create so effortlessly for the ears and their best friends, perhaps, the eyes, cuddling up together as one. I particularly love the languishing expression of the feeling in the past continuous tense, which goes so well with the elastic, yielding sound rhythm of the prosody and the music. Not often does Henk Hofstede write love tunes, but when he does he knows how to express the nature of this emotion so perfectly in its musical equivalent. The longing for what has passed, in a lingering rhythm which from time to time is revived by a sparkle of a hopeful memory. That’s what makes this such a glorious love song. And how the love felt for one person, in a true Spinozist way, finds its echo in everything we cherish, like in the blue raincoat of a song for instance.

In the video Henk explains where this strange title came from: “Grrr… to you”. Niki de Saint Phalle often ended her passionate love letters to Jean Tinguely by these curious words. The two apparently had a very tumultuous relationship and grrr … to you, well, it just speaks for itself, no… ?

Grrr…to the dishes…

Joke Roelandt, April 2020