One Media® presents "Blue Bits" by Nowhere Near (electro-acoustic Blues Rock Electronica music video)
"Blue Bits"
Almost all Greatest Hits have some Blue Bits...
One Media® humbly offers Blue Bits for a Steemit Music League #smlchallenge season two, round eleven (S2:R11) entry in the theme of Greatest Hits...
Recorded April 28, 2018, Blue Bits features an electro-acoustic blues rock tune arranged with Rhodes, a hollow body with sustain, some fiddle, and bits of electronica.
In all honesty, One Media® perceives the term, 'Greatest Hits' as somewhat alien, perhaps a self-limiting belief, but certainly a commitment to pursuing the esoteric. Expressly seeking novelty over popularity in the music videos they produce, One Media® artists seem oblivious to popular trends, and clearly tend to rely on intuition more than marketing statistics when it comes to aesthetic judgement. However, always eager to expand musical horizons and win the hearts and minds of new audiences, the prompt of 'Greatest Hits' in a Steemit Music League #smlchallenge inspired Nowhere Near to make this simple musical statement: for the past century, the majority of tunes that have garnered the status of 'Greatest Hits' tend to have roots in the music style we call, The Blues.
Of course we could have been pragmatic and just re-posted the music video that has enjoyed the most views which would qualify as a viable metric for 'greatest hit' qualities, considering more ears have likely taken in that tune compared to 'units sold' (notwithstanding all the promotional discs given away) of all previous efforts pressed or taped. Anyway, those were albums, not 'singles' further obfuscating the 'Greatest Hits' goal, as no one single tune in all the releases seemed quite appropriate for this present contest. Furthermore, that aforementioned 'greatest hit' music video tune by Nowhere Near has deeply esoteric, meditative qualities, and more likely evokes mystical experience than experiencing an 'upbeat' feeling of a 'crowd pleaser'. All things considered, we sought the optimal compromise between rehashing popular cliché and blazing a trail that only a few dare traverse.
So the tune opens with a twelve bar head with a fairly typical Chicago Blues bass line and a somewhat novel turnaround, then an eight bar solo section in an alluring uptempo 6/8 time signature. Using major ninths and thirteenths in the melody line gives a novel, modernist Jazz era feel, and in the solo section, serendipitous hints at one of Cole Porter's greatest hits, 'Love For Sale'. With the Rhodes and sustained hollow body patches giving the tune an overall cool jazz instrumental arrangement, fiddle was added as sweetener and suggestive of folk and country music, which along with blues, fairly much defined the direction in which popular music took throughout the twentieth century. Of course a bit of electronica was needed to bring the tune into the twenty first century where, a few bits of electronica, eight bits in this present sample to be precise, appears to be predominating the sensibilities of how popular music must sound these days.
Happy listening!
Zig