Nits’s Philosophy of Shoes

The 25th shape is a pair of shoes

Since we are halfway now (the 25th shape) on this imaginary road of Nits forms, it is time to take stock of the state of our shoes. After all they are what makes it a little more comfortable for us to go out in this world and explore it. Nits have certainly never underestimated the power and mystery of this quite ordinary thing that we use almost daily and which we cover our feet with practically mechanically, without giving it much thought.
One of the fathers of phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, wrote an essay trying to answer the question “What is art?”. If I may summarise his ideas freely I’d say that a work of art is something that expresses in one way or another what it means for a human being to be-in-the-world. It’s as simple as that! It is not just about feelings, moods or emotions nor about beauty or craftsmanship or technique. The work of art grasps something almost indefinable that touches our whole being and the way we “are” in this world. One of the examples Heidegger chooses to illustrate his theory is a painting of Vincent Van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes. The shoes are worn-out, a testimony to the hardships perhaps of the peasant in question, to the scars we all assemble as we touch the ground with our feet and make our way through the world. A pair of simple shoes as the ultimate work of art. Something Nits could most certainly empathise with I guess.
Ever since my first acquaintance with Nits I had this clear intuition that Nits were telling me somehow what it means to be in this world.

Giant Normal Dwarf is without a doubt the “shoes album” of Nits: it probably has them in all sizes and colours. Listening to the album it would appear that with the right shoes on our feet, we can get almost anywhere, into an unbridled world of fantasy where the most unusual things can happen in the material world where music introduces its own rules of the imagination. The opening song “Radio Shoes” – one of the most revealing and iconic songs of the band – states just that: musical shoes, the waves of music as a radio signal transported to us out of somewhere far away via this little – sometimes portable (as on the cover of their very first album: how revelatory really!) – object that produces sounds and songs and brings them into our houses, they open up a whole new world of fantasy to us; they guide our steps into undiscovered musical fantasies that show us a world – different from the real one – where it is good to escape to from time to time. When we close off all the doors and windows and just are in a world of musical forms, shapes, colours and ideas. And indeed what a treat this album turned out to be! Those radio shoes were magical beyond belief – even more so than the famous red shoes of Dorothy! Or than those in Bowie’s song “Let’s Dance”.

From early on shoes were a regular presence in the lyrical world of Nits. Bobby Solo was looking at Henk’s shoes (always the eye-catchers). And the song footprint introduces shoes in quite an unusual lugubrious way for Nits standards. But on the album In the Dutch Mountains we encounter another legendary instance of the symbolic magnitude of the shoes, in the song “Two Skaters”. Unfortunately the shoes of the skates were too large, but never mind. In a most wonderful parenthesis in music, Henk Hofstede utters the line “Your sister in brown shoes – walking down the street – as it begins to snow” … In this phrase the whole weight of the ice in this icy song seems to come down on us in the form of melancholy, like the weight of all our experiences, the weight of memories, of personal histories, of the individual path we all take in this world. The weight, the drama, the sagacity, the beauty, the quiet … Those brown shoes are no less but the equals of the peasant shoes painted by Van Gogh. What Van Gogh did by painting, Nits achieve in this moment of music with the shoes in a star role. Such magnificence really! Can you hear it too?

In a favourite Ting song of mine “White Night” a raincoat and a pair of shoes steal the show once more. A deep forlornness speaks through the musical spareness. This song with a raincoat in it, has the same profoundness for me as the famous-blue-raincoat song by Leonard Cohen. The clothes and the shoes as the favourite accessories of the lyricist of Nits for making our portrait as we move through the world. Where the life of you and me is depicted as a waiting and walking … we wear a raincoat and shoes. This is perhaps the reason why I was so touched by the verses on the latest album by Nits where Henk writes that the wind had no clothes and the rain had no shoes. It was impossible for the rain and the wind to empathise with the fate of human beings, the fate of Nits. Henk Hofstede expresses this idea by suggesting the nakedness of the wind and the rain: without the human attire that are our clothes and our shoes. They make us human. 
And somehow these Nits shoes often seem to encounter rain, ice or snow on their path …

In Jacob’s House there was a shoe box that had a tape in it with the voice of a boy.

The shoes album ends of course with another shoe song, and not the least one. In fact it is surely one of the most fabulous songs of Nits. I am talking of course about “The Infinite Shoeblack”, a true marvel of a song.
The Infinite Shoeblack is the name of a character in a book titled “Sartor Resartus” or “The Tailor Retailored” by Thomas Carlyle. This curious book oddly enough contains a philosophy of clothes (I wrote about this in my text “The Secret Power of Shoe Polish”). The infinite shoeblack is a man who shines shoes for a living but is very unhappy. In the book the philosopher named Teufelsdröckh claims that man’s unhappiness stems from his greatness: there is a sense of the infinite in man that he never manages to bury under all the finite futileness of his many earthly occupations and aspirations. Nothing can make the shoeblack happy for more than an hour or two, because the shoeblack is not just a stomach that can be filled time upon time as hunger arises, no, he is a soul primarily which always hungers for more, for the infinity of it all which he can of course never attain…  

The Nits song pictures a girl and a boy on a journey to unleash the power of imagination and bring it back into a black, monochrome, monotone world. They want to re-awaken the dreamlike energy hidden in all material things. Polishing the blackness of the world until the light shines through, until the black gives way to an infinite, glimmering glow. The shoes, the black shoes, they need to be shined and turned back into the wide, infinite mirrors of the imagination. Under the bell-glass the girl and boy find these wonderful black shoes that have the ultimate power of musical imagination. So the world is opened up again to light and lightness of being, to smiles and colours, accompanied by enchantingly sweet fairytale sounds of a keyboard: Mmmmmmmmmmm…. Can you hear in the music the cautious steps of the girl and boy, the heavy footsteps of the giant – all wearing radio shoes – on their way to the clear transparent bell-glass of wonders?
This man with shirt and suit, perfect radio shoes and a hat sometimes, who brings us music to feed our soul that hungers – against better judgment – for the infinity of it all … he somehow understands the need we have in our world of all kinds of “vestments” as Thomas Carlyle calls them: “l’esprit de costume”, what an elegant way to navigate the world.

And so the album Giant Normal Dwarf contains as it were Nits’s philosophy of shoes, one that is well worth exploring – their philosophy of clothes might be the subject of yet another shape. “What beautiful shoes you have on your feet”. Watch those Nitsfeet closely!
And those shoes need to be polished of course regularly. In the song “Giant Normal Dwarf”, in a poetic scene of winter snow slowly melting away, the protagonist promises to polish his girlfriend’s shoes.

May those radio shoes of Nits never wear out …!

Joke Roelandt, March 2025