Street Nostalgia: When you walk in Dapper Street

The ninth and tenth shapes are a street and a city

If I were allowed to rearrange one Nits album, it would be cute, little KILO. I’d replace the last song “Your next tyres” (no disrespect!) by a song from the album “Henk”, by the “Sleep” song, “What Happens Now To Your Eyes” and I’d end up with perhaps one of Nits’ all time best and most refined albums which takes shape along the streets of European cities. Pardon my cheekiness … With street songs that are situated in Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice, Berlin, cities or towns in Germany and perhaps Delft or The Hague in the case of Robert Jan’s song “Memories are new”, where you walk along a lonely avenue. Such captivating city views and atmospheres arise from all these songs!

Of course pop and rock music are streetwise. They always have been. The somewhat commonplace ordinariness of the street is where pop music often takes its inspiration from. Pop is not bothered about things being ugly, about scenes of beauty being alternated by scenes of decay, about the imperfection and roughness of life on the streets, its randomness and coarseness. It is a place where life unfolds itself, where the state of the world shows itself in full view, undisguised. Pop music is not tied up in a concert hall or a fancy “salon”, it hasn’t got the grandeur of the symphony or the polishedness of chamber music. Pop music moves with the rhythm of the street, nonchalant and easygoing, all sorts of dreamers, visionaries and artists walk its pathways. It takes in the vibes of its surroundings, it’s not essentially, in its origin, a music that arises from a paper scripture. Time and time again I find myself stunned at the power of this music genre – in its most poignant moments in the voices and melodies of some of its most soulful, dreamy and wise performers – in evoking the nature of our time, what it’s like to be alive here and now, its inspiration to keep on going on, to remain vibrant and full of life despite this enormous awareness of the ephemerality of everything around us, of our world and of ourselves, that seeps through most of these short-spanned musical affirmations. I was listening to one of these old street songs – by Bob Seger who wrote his own “Dapper Street” of the American Midwest – filled with a nostalgia that is so beautiful and heartfelt and I realise again that pop music is a music genre of the moment; it is not the music of eternity, which some expressions in the language of “classical music” might aspire to and might even have succeeded at, no, pop music is not concerned about the eternal, it is right here and now and it has the force of this lively present moment going right through it; it takes everything in almost instinctively or intuitively; it is one of the most “direct” or “immediate” forms of music. Pop music is in fact quite humble by nature; its most meaningful expressions are often those of musicians who have managed to keep this modesty at the centre of their musical persona. Staying down to earth is an aspect I have always admired in musicians like Paul McCartney or Leonard Cohen and of course Nits. Henk Hofstede is even spotted in some of the Nits videos with a broom, sweeping the street of his old neighbourhood …And what place is more down to earth than the street? The house in the middle of their street, is where it all begins.

But the street views laid down in the KILO songs of Nits are a touch different. They somehow share the sophistication that these European cities obviously possess. And Nits took over these sophisticated forms and shapes of Europeanness in their musical city scapes. These songs house the beauty of cultural forms of course,  in the many sights and aspects in which it manifests itself throughout those European fairytale cities of painters, writers, poets, cineasts and musicians, but these elements of beauty are overshadowed by many a haunting cloud or menacing enemy. Beauty and destruction, beauty and “progress”, beauty and war, beauty and unfreedom, beauty and loss, beauty and angst, beauty and heartache, beauty and death … Nits capture these antagonisms as old as the European streets and forests in a most sublime way. I mean have you ever heard our cities portrayed in pop music in such a “stylised” and complete way, portraying the good and bad, the beauty and ugliness that are part of our European heritage? Nits shape pop songs à la façon de Schubert, Chopin or Debussy …

When Nits do a pop song about a European city, it will very often have a touch of grandeur, and possess the ability to stay relevant for longer, for more than one or two generations, like a painting does, like Vermeer’s portrayal of the city of Delft for instance – well “for instance” might be too casual a word to refer to this masterpiece of city painting by Johannes Vermeer – and I feel the same applies to these citypop songs by Nits. They have a whiff of something “eternal” about them, something classic, something that would make perfect sense imagined as an accompanying sound in a European museum perhaps or a train station or in a cinematographic scene… or at a poetry recital? The pop of Nits crosses bridges between different art forms, different music genres, different epochs. It can do Goethe or Schubert, it can talk about Tintoretto or a newspaper in a neo-classical version … easily. Citypop in crisp white shirts or in something a little more sumptuous like a venetian costume drama in music, ball room gowns, masks, capes and hats or those white neck ruffs of portrayed noblemen and women … In all their simplicity these city songs do still sound sumptuous and elegant. Nits’ city pop is drenched in the history of all these fabulous places, it is moulded in the statuesqueness of their buildings, the richness and variety of both their aristocratic and plebeian past and present. The candour with which Nits write and muse about this past and present world makes their music sound like a fairytale of Europe.
When you listen to the opening notes of “Dapper Street”, it is as if you’d open the majestic wooden doors of an ancient stately mansion on one of the city’s legendary canals and then take in the view of splendour revealed, but you are actually in a busy market street in the heart of Amsterdam, you can even hear a market vendor shouting in the distance. “Acres of Tintoretto” opens with a rhythmic movement that could be the one of climbing the steps of a centuries-old Venetian palace, yet the song tells of rats and dirt in this water city of marvels. And then the beauty of Henk Hofstede’s aristocratic voice rises up from this musical elegance, and leads the eyes on a tour amongst historic streets and alleys where art and life, poetry and life mingle as if they were one.

Pop’s best songs can bring back passed moments with a vivacity that is almost painful. I was referring – earlier on – to the singer, guitarist and rock legend Bob Seger. One of his lines says it all: “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”. Pop wants to preserve the purity and directness of the moment, the innocence of the moment, the innocence and energy of youth, the freshness of the first encounters with life, when you step out into the world. Bob Seger’s street song is one of the closest to my heart. “Mainstreet” it is called and I can’t listen to it without tears in my eyes. Pop music is a metaphor for venturing out into the world, as a young person, and being confronted with the difficulties, the changes and the heartaches that arise from the incongruity of what goes on in the world on the one hand and what happens in your own inner world. The two worlds meeting … and the street is one of these prominent spaces where this intersection, this confrontation takes place. Nits’ work is the ultimate expression in pop of this encounter with the world. Henk Hofstede’s lyrics have always faced the world around him (even in its imagined form, it was still “world” that was on his mind, the stage of forms, colours and shapes where life happens); world was always his soundboard. Nits knew how to preserve this “youngness” in their music, they stayed alert and curious. This freshness of first venturing out into the world, remained a constant in their music. If you lose that, you will only be repeating yourself. And Nits have always been very aware of this fact. Even on their latest album “Tree House Fire”, they kept this sense of wonder alive in their fable like manner of telling the story of a tree, a house and a bird menaced by the fire.

“Streets of London” by Ralph McTell is another such street gem as is of course “Penny Lane” by The Beatles which is much more cheerful; its nostalgia is still light and carefree. “Mainstreet”, “Streets of London”, “Penny Lane”, “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” and “Highway 61 revisited” (a road “that was in his blood” Dylan said), “The 59th Street Bridge Song” written by Paul Simon… and “Dapper Street”. It is simply astounding how many pop songs written by young artists in such a “youthful” genre are impregnated with the awareness of the fragility and sorrow of life and the passing of time. When I lived in London, our first flat was just a 5 minute walk from Baker Street. I remember walking there, feeling homesick and whispering to myself “Just one more year and then you’d be happy …”  Streets as places of melancholy. 
I sometimes feel that pop music these days seems to be in danger to lose this special and very strong tie with melancholy somewhat. These composers of street songs that I just mentioned, they know something about music, they know something about life and they found the perfect space of intersection in some of the most beautiful tunes ever written, songs about streets, where we venture out into the world, where we see the world change, where we make connections between who we are and what is out there. The interaction, tension or happy agreement between the two is laid down so perfectly in these street songs of musical story tellers: streets as places of longing or fear and alienation, of ugliness and beauty, of discovery and affinity, of happiness or sadness. The streets are simply places where we meet the world. On a rainy street, in the middle of town, surrounded by buildings, you can come up with the most profound ideas for a song, how odd is that then? Not for broomsweeper Henk Hofstede though; next to the water, the clouds and trees, the cemented world of the streets and towns is a constant path along which his musical exploration takes shape, the sound of his footsteps, or the pedalling movements of his feet when riding his bike, traveling musical miles on the streets of his life. His picture book “Iceberg” is a perfect illustration of the street and city pop of Nits. “Why are you filming this?” Henk Hofstede asks himself. Maybe because you have always been – and still are – fascinated by what’s out there, by “world”?

Joke Roelandt, June 2024