#like general music taste interpretation and i just add a few songs here n there | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

n0r14k1-k4ky01n · 4 years ago

Note

hello! this might be a bit of a weird alsk but can i request headcanons for the crusaders x reader having a vibe session at 2 in the morning? maybe they just had a rough day and decided to listen to loud music at 2am and dye their hair to make them self feel better. the reader is a bit less verbal about their emotions so they just kinda vibe to music? thank you for your time, have a nice day/night/evening!

!!! First ask, woo!!! This is actually so adorable, I love it- I'm gonna say this takes place after the Egypt trip (in an everyone lives AU, of course) so no one is pestering you to sleep for obvious reasons, lol. Also, I wasn't sure if you meant for this to be romantic or not, so I made it kinda ambiguous. You can interpret it how you like tho!!

Crusaders Having A Vibe Session With The Reader At 2AM!!

Jotaro

Jotaro... Probably doesn't sleep very well anyways.

He hears you up and moving at 2am, gives a quiet yare yare as he realizes he's not gonna get any sleep tonight, takes a few minutes to mentally prepare, and goes to check on you.

He finds you as you're waiting for the dye to set, raising an eyebrow, but not reacting much otherwise.

He's used to nonverbal communication, not to mention observant as hell, so he can tell pretty easily that you're not doing so hot.

"... Bad day?"

You just nod in response. He sighs and sits himself down next to you.

This is a rare opportunity to lean on him without being pushed off. He might even put an arm around your shoulder.

He's gonna help you with the rest of your hair if you ask, but only if you explain how, and let him pick the next few songs. He has a very specific music taste, it's a wonder he's been listening to what you put on with only a few snide comments here and there.

... But he'll still take your music taste into account too. Don't point it out, he'll deny it and get grumpy.

When all is said and done, you're definitely gonna fall asleep first. If he's up, he's up. He won't move you (other than off his shoulder) but he'll shut off the music, and if you left your phone unlocked, there's a good chance he'll shut off any alarms you have. He's sure you need the rest, even if you might get pissy that he did something like that without asking.

As long as you're feeling a bit better, he couldn't care less if you're upset at him.

Kakyoin

Either he was already out cold by midnight, or he stayed up playing videogames. Regardless, he's gonna hear the music at some point, and go out to check on you.

He shows up before you've actually dyed your hair, a more confused than he is annoyed.

"Y/N, why on earth are you up this late...?"

"You don't have room to judge, Nori."

"...Touché."

He catches on that you're not doing so hot, and sticks around, trying to fall into a comfortable silence with you.

... The key word here is "trying".

He feels really awkward being around people in the first place, especially one-on-one. Add in the fact that there's nothing but the music to keep him from overthinking...

He's piping up every little while with a fun fact about something or another. He doesn't actually know what to say, but he can't stand the silence, so that's his way of trying to fill the void. He doesn't mind if you don't respond with much more than a nod, just acknowledge that he said something and he's fine.

He let's you pick all the music. He likes just about anything, and besides, you're not doing so hot. It's the least he can do.

He'd also absolutely help you dye your hair, and he already knows how. He's definitely looked into dying his own, but is too worried it won't look better than what he already has, or that it won't look good enough to be worth the time/effort/money.

Once again, you'll probably fall asleep first. This man has trained himself well in the art of "I'm doing something, sleep can wait". An Epic Gaymer™ of the highest degree.

He'll probably try to move you to your bed, but unless he can very easily pick you up, he's just gonna leave you there. Maybe shift you so you're lying down. He just really doesn't wanna accidentally wake you up.

Avdol

I'm gonna start this one off by saying I'm so sorry, I have no idea how to write for Avdol-

Probably still up when he hears you. One of my personal headcanons is that he opens his shop in the evening and shuts it down in the day, since tarot stuff seems to be a lot more popular with the night crowd, so he's on a bit of a weird sleep schedule anyway.

Immediately concerned. He's pretty good at picking up on other people's emotions.

"Y/N, you look down. Is there anything I could do to help...?"

Just ask him to stick around and he will. He might even make you some tea, if you like it. Or like, hot chocolate. But no coffee unless it's decaf, he's not about to let you stay up later than you need to.

He's okay with the silence, actually. Will open his arms up for a cuddle, if you want. He's such a good space heater cuddler.

He doesn't really know how to help you dye your hair, but he'll try if you tell him how! Honestly, just let him know what you need in general, and he'll do it in a heartbeat... So long as it's not gonna backfire in the long run, like caffeine, or starting a big task/project (it's the middle of the night, for Pete's sake).

Might suggest listening to quieter music after you've finished with your hair, in an attempt to help you wind down and maybe fall asleep.

... But it's a 50/50 as to who actually falls asleep first. If he manages to stay up, he'll try and carry you to bed. If he can't, he's gonna wake you up and tell you to go properly lay down. He feels bad about disturbing you, but it's better than letting you sleeping funny and get a sore neck.

Polnareff

See, Polnareff needs his beauty sleep. He's out at a reasonable time, 11 at the very latest, and your music absolutely woke him up.

He's gonna stomp out of his room grumbling and groggy.

"It's 2 in the damn morning, Y/N, what the hell...?"

Not the most observant of the bunch, so for him to clue in, you'll either need to look like death, or straight up tell him you feel like shit.

Any hint of grumpiness or sleepiness is gone in an instant, replaced by a small gasp and so much worry.

This man is absolutely going to help you with your hair. Hell, if you let him, he's going to try and give you a full-blown spa experience. Face mask, nail painting, he might give you a massage!! Please indulge him, it's going to be so nice and he's going to be so happy he could help. But, if not, he's more than happy to just sit with you.

However, unless you specifically ask him to be quiet, he's going to talk your ear off. He won't mind if you don't respond, he's more than happy to just blabber about anything that crosses his mind.

Hell, even if you do ask him to hush, he's gonna struggle with it. He never stops talking, the absolute dork.

He'll suggest songs he thinks you might enjoy, and will sometimes ask if you can skip one or two that he really doesn't like, but for the most part you have free range over the music.

He's going to try so hard to stay awake, but he's used to a full 8 hours or more, so he's falling asleep first. Though, when he wakes up, he's gonna remember what happened last night and apologize profusely for passing out on you. Oh, and compliment how nice your hair looks in the natural light, of course.

Joseph

Another early sleeper. When he was younger, he'd stay up until the wee hours of the morning with no problems, but nowadays he's pretty consistent about passing out at 10 on the dot. Your music woke him up, which is impressive, because he sleeps like a rock.

Manages to be less grumpy than Polnareff when he comes out, but not by much.

"Geez, Y/N, could you please save all the noise for the daytime?"

However, he's still got his paternal instincts, and as soon as he gets a good look at you, he's gonna know somethings up.

He's gonna insist on helping dye your hair. Hell, if the dye is temporary, there's a good chance he'll ask if he can dye his too! He doesn't see why not, and besides, it might get you to smile.

That's his main goal here, actually. He'll try not to talk too much, but similarly to Kakyoin, he's not great with silence. The difference is that he's gonna fill it with terrible dad jokes and over-the-top stories rather than fun facts. But if you really want him to shush, he'll try his best. He'll get quieter the later it gets anyways. He just wants to make you happy.

Expect him to hum along to any songs he knows, but he won't ask you to play anything specific.

Absolutely going to cuddle you if you let him. He's a very good cuddler/pillow.

Although he's probably really sleepy, absolutely refuses to fall asleep first. As soon as you're out, he'll shut off the music and carry you to your bed, no matter if he struggles with it or not. Tucks you in, pats your head, the whole nine yards.

... And then he goes and passes the hell out too. He's an old man, leave him be.

#jjba #jojo part 3 #stardust crusaders #jjba imagines #jjba scenarios #jjba x reader #jotaro kujo #noriaki kakyoin #muhammad avdol #jean pierre polnareff #joseph joestar #this was a really fun first ask #thank you for requesting!!!

128 notes · View notes

cureforbedbugs · 7 years ago

Text

Dance with Somebody

I wanna dance

My son started dancing a few months ago. He's neither coordinated nor athletic, so his dancing alternates between impressionistic arm waving and a spin move in which he hurtles his body into space and trusts it will not land on a sharp corner. (So far so good.)

We "danced" with him prior to him wanting to dance, but most of this was performative, and often included him as a less-than-willing participant. To be honest, it was mostly an excuse to try out our own music on him. What was clear enough then, and is really obvious now, is that taste doesn't follow the "hypodermic needle" theory of media effects even from birth. We are one influence, a powerful one, among many, including the idiosyncratic workings of our little guy's independent mind.

And so he dances, alone, in a kind of distant reverie. We go to his preschool to find him separated from the other kids, dancing on his own. Sometimes he snaps to when he sees that we've arrived. Sometimes he just keeps going.

And he dances with us now, but even at home it's still alone. He wants to dance. He doesn't really need us; when he wants to dance with us, it's for us to see him dance and, sometimes, to see us dance, too. And so we dance like he dances. Poorly, but privately, but together. It's the way I dance when I'm dancing alone, and the way I danced when I was a kid, too. There's an old home video of me, probably around age 4 or 5, dancing in my room with a ski mask on. The movements and twitches and peculiar isolated euphoria are uncannily like my son's. I end with an ostentatious spin move, too, hurling myself onto the floor before announcing that I'm too tired to continue. (It sounds like I was listening to the jazz station.)

My son: "Daddy, do you want to see my special dance move? It's like this..."

Right now, the song that makes him dance the most -- and also think about and talk about music the most, music as a form that can be cherished and picked apart -- is "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" by Whitney Houston, a song we never introduced him to, but now listen to constantly.

This is a song that he loves to dance to, and that he also identifies as a dance song. That's an important distinction in his budding world of categorization. Right now his tastes have split into three interrelated playlist-cum-genres (or is it vice versa?): Dance Songs, Rock 'n' Roll Songs, and Crazy Animals. After he was born, we started an omnibus playlist to play during the times we stuck him on the floor and didn't want to ignore him. (His brother is a bit less lucky in this regard, though he's mostly focused on the older kid.) That bloated playlist, now as useless as it is unnavigable, is a hodgepodge of pop, dance, novelty, and old-timey rock 'n' roll. And just about none of it appears on any of his new playlists.

Rock 'n' Roll involves big guitars, big hooks, big hair. He loves "Back in Black" by AC/DC -- sonically at first (I played it for him in the car on the rare time he asked me to play something he didn't know), but later it was cemented as a playlist staple because it's about a Bad Guy, a character type with which he is, if not obsessed, then at least intensely curious. His favorite bad guys, in no particular order, are Darth Vader, Jack Skellington, and Rasputin. I always try to make sure that he knows that "bad guys" are complicated, and they're usually not all bad (my insistence that Jack Skellington is not in fact a bad guy at all is belied by the fact that Jack Skellington intentionally scares the bejeezus out of children for fun).

The protagonist in Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" is more ambiguous. He comes from a land of ice and snow, which is a graspable detail, and then...a bunch of other words. To be honest, those are the only words I can remember myself. That's the point where my son asks me to start it over -- DUN duh-duh DUH-dun, DUN duh-duh DUH-dun, aaaaaaaaaah!

His favorite rock 'n' roll song has a title complicated enough that he just calls it "my favorite," even though it is one of ten or so songs that he likes about equally. He calls it "my favorite" because it's his best friend's favorite, and it's not at all clear why it's her favorite. So it's also unclear whether or not "favorite song" denotes an actual favorite, or is just a generic description, like "rock 'n' roll" or "crazy animal."

That song, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" by the Darkness, is the first time his tastes have intersected with mine and my wife's completely serendipitously. We would never even have thought to play him the Darkness. He loves it when he says "hunh!" before the first guitar solo, and especially loves it when he says "gui-TAR!" before the second guitar solo.

Crazy Animals and Dance Songs are a bit more self-explanatory. Crazy Animal songs are songs that (1) feature animal references or animal noises and (2) make my son very happy. Crazy Frog, which I hadn't thought to include in my son's novelty diet when he was very young, made an unexpected appearance about a week ago -- the Verizon music network has it in its most popular video queue along with things that came out mere weeks ago, which makes it a novelty evergreen like Hampton the Hamster on Radio Disney -- and now it (Crazy Frog) is the center of his Crazy Animal universe. (That means I finally got the chance to introduce Wang Rong, three years later. He likes it considerably less than Crazy Frog. When I suggested L'Trimm's "He's a Mutt" for a Crazy Dog, he stopped me and told me to just add "Who Let the Dogs Out.") This sort of list is the kind of thing I was born to curate, though it only holds his attention for a few minutes at a time, as it probably should.

Dance Songs need to refer to dancing fairly explicitly, though "Can't Stop the Feeling" by Justin Timberlake counts. (He calls the song "Sunishine in My Pocket," which is how I learned that my son doesn't really care for, and certainly won't dance to, "Pocketful of Sunshine" by Natasha Bedingfield.) All songs currently on the Dance Songs playlist are songs I didn't introduce to him -- including "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga, and, of course, "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" by Whitney Houston. The latter is the clear favorite, and it's a pleasure to watch my son dig in to the minutiae of its sounds and its tricks (the anticipatory drums into the chorus -- "buh-buh-buh-buh!"; the commanding "DANCE!" punctuation from a male background chorus; "somebody, hoooooo!"), discovering something new with each listen -- so much so, in fact, that he talks about what might happen "next time" he listens, as though the song itself will change, and not just his understanding of it, which feels very deeply right in the way that children's understandings of things so often can.

With somebody

When I listened to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" as a kid, usually on my sister's Pocket Rocker cassette player in her room, I always imagined the main character in it -- the "dancer" -- as a bit like my son now, or me in that ski mask -- self-contained energy, satisfied dancing alone. The video isolates Houston against a plain backdrop that matches her purple dress, garishly backlit, as though everything has melted away from her and now she's starting to burn through the screen itself. Whitney Houston was like that, a narrow spotlight against an abyss, all on her, all on the voice. (My son: "Daddy, she has a very powerful voice.") Sure, she wants to dance with somebody, but she doesn't sound like she needs to. Who could keep up with her?

My son seems to have that interpretation, too. When he sings it to himself, he'll start to interpolate a bit: "I want you to dance with somebody." It's the overriding impression, no matter what the lyric sheet says, and who parses the verses? Her singing this song in this way just proves that she has -- is -- everything already. So YOU find somebody, even if the somebody is just yourself, and dance with them. Which is to say: DANCE.

But now I detect an undercurrent of quiet distress -- hey, this energy is pulling everyone toward me, but they're not with me. (And what good is that?) And that just sits there, a little echo of an idea -- an idea that's there pretty obviously on the page, in the lyrics, but not so obviously in the song itself -- it's just all of this potential sadness running through everything, an aside, maybe an anxious whisper throughout the song that you wouldn't even notice unless you really looked for it. Maybe you're just hearing things.

My son wonders who it is with that low voice that's chanting "DANCE" toward the end. He loves that part.

"Who is that?" More laughter.

I hear a bit of menace in that bit when I listen to it without dancing to it -- insert the intertitle here, sans danse, quelle tristesse! -- it's an oddly direct command in a song whose every other element compels dancing without needing to bark an order -- and this odd overcompensation happening after the song has long since hit its groove and we've long since decided to dance.

But no, it's goofy! Enough so that we do a low, grumbly impression together -- "DANCE" -- and we laugh -- what is that! -- almost as much as "somebody...hooooooo!"

The sadness hit me as I was sitting in the basement of my in-laws' house, the song playing from a tinny iPhone speaker, my son thrashing against the couch, and I just heard for a moment -- "loneliness calls." It was an emotional ambush, in Mark Sinker's phrasing, of the sort that I've come to savor. The singalong is "when the night falls, my lonely heart calls" -- and something about that phrasing, "my lonely heart," makes the loneliness a bit more affected. She's a member of a lonely hearts club, a reference that to this day feels weirdly alien to me, maybe just generationally. (I always thought "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was intentional word salad -- which to be fair it was, but it scans as a real possible club, not just a string of disconnected words.)

But the first line, at the end of the first verse, is more blunt than that. "Loneliness calls." Something about that phrase struck me in that moment, not least because "loneliness calls" might be the general unspoken -- well, occasionally spoken -- thesis, or maybe heart, of a lot of music my students listen to -- a big, sad idea that I imagine like a spreading gray funk over the chart landscape that has literally slowed pop music to a crawl. "I can hear the perkys calling." "All my friends are dead." Loneliness calls.

I haven't been lonely in a long time. When it was just me and my wife, loneliness still called, even if I didn't have a lonely heart. I remembered what being lonely was like, sometimes even when my wife was there with me. I could feel the loneliness, even if abstractly I understood that I wasn't alone.

I don't really feel loneliness now that I have young kids. I'm not saying that as some transformative development that's improved my life in a meaningful way. Having kids had no effect on my anxiety or panic, for instance, and had no effect on my sense of my own personal or professional aspirations, even if it accelerated a kind of limning process that was underway before I had kids. It's a more neutral observation: of the many emotions that I've felt after having kids, sometimes with an intensity that I haven't felt since childhood, if at all -- manic joy, gut-wrenching sadness -- loneliness just hasn't reared its head. That's a double-edged sword; I also like being alone, and I haven't been alone in three years.

So it moved me, I guess, listening there in the basement, to discover for the first time that this person really does sound lonely. Here she is, orchestrating a whole world around herself, with her Very Powerful Voice, Queen Elsa building a magenta ice castle in the tundra. But when the night falls, loneliness calls. (And here she differs from Elsa, who is set free in her solitude -- a point so obvious that even children pick up on it immediately, casting Elsa as a superhoero, even though the movie itself never really resolves this message -- solitude will set you free -- with its actual ending.)

So a song about dancing with somebody, a song that I've used in my own life primarily to dance by myself, and acts socially as a paean to dancing by oneself, was the thing that got me thinking about loneliness, and my lack of it.

I wanna feel the heat

When I was making a film about my mom, who died of cancer when I was seven, I always paused at a line of hers in one of her journals. She describes lying in bed in the hospital, alone. She says: "I crave their little bodies more than at any other time."

I never really knew how to place that line in the general schema of what I knew about my mom. I knew that she loved us, obviously, loved being near us, being with us. But "crave their little bodies" -- there was something so...well, weird. Our little bodies?

As it turns out, there is literally no better -- no other -- way to say it. I crave their little bodies, and to be lonely is to crave their little bodies more than at any other time. That's the feeling, as plain to understand as "loneliness calls" or "somebody hoooooo!" or "gui-TAR!" Given how non-affectionate (not "unaffectionate," exactly) my family became after Mom died, the sheer closeness to someone in a relationship outside of romance came as a shock to me. I was slow to it. I didn't trust it, or myself around it. It was hard to be so close.

"I like the way she goes, 'I wanna feel the heeeeeeeeeat'!"

Heat, bodies. Even now a part of me recoils. The brain part. My son has started saying something that I think he picked up from his preschool: "my body says X and my brain says Y." Usually these are the same -- "my body says I have to poop and my brain says I have to poop."

My brain says that's not right, this can't be right, and my body says "I wanna feel the heat."

That you want the heat doesn't mean that you want to dance, necessarily. Our dancing doesn't generate much heat, to be honest, aside from working up an occasional crown of sweat. There's Whitney Houston, dancing, dancing, dancing, generating all that heat, and that's the heat that we want, but none of it is the heat she wants. Somebody who loves me. How do you know? Because they're there. They're still there.

Another reason "lonely heart" doesn't hit as hard as just-plain-loneliness, I guess -- that lack, that loss, it isn't a lonely heart, except in a cliche. Your heart stays full. Your brain holds on. It's your body that empties out. You wanna feel the heat. You want somebody there with you, next to you, so close that you you might reabsorb them, protect them from ever feeling what you fear you might now be capable of feeling should it ever happen. Better to dance for a bit than even entertain the thought, though there that thought is, every day. (Wait, who isn't bothered by the cold?)

I spent a lot of my life thinking about my mom, feeling sorry for myself. Now I mostly just feel sorry for her. I used to have some vague sense that she left us, but she never left us. She lost us.

Hooooo!

Pop songs can melt the surroundings, burn out the backdrop, but mostly they are the surroundings; they are the backdrop. I'm glad that I was able to finish my homework as a critic early enough to figure out how to weave all of this stuff back into my life and break down walls between Serious Analytical Work and Serious Life-Living before I had kids. I'm entirely sure that having kids isn't what did it, but I am also fairly sure that doing it helps me to have kids.

Doing all that breaking down work as a conscious critical exercise or whatever you want to call it helped me make room in my body AND my brain to appreciate it when I get gobsmacked from left field. I've approached my taste that way -- hanging out in left fields wondering how to shift them to the center -- longer than I've had kids, and lord knows I didn't need to have kids to appreciate Crazy Frog. Though I did, funnily enough, need to have kids to appreciate Adele's "Hello," which I can now play on the piano and in fact is the easiest song to transfer from toddler psyche to piano. Mostly I let him fiddle around on it.

Having kids mostly reaffirmed that I was right to insist on discovery and serendipity and, when necessary, the humility of getting totally bowled over by something that's dumb as shit, or appreciating when something has layers you weren't expecting (and maybe had layers that no one was expecting, or even noticed, or even existed, strictly speaking, until you made 'em up). I was right to think that there's a muse in us that can't be explained away; that even when you're three, or even when you're three talking about when you were two -- "when I was two, did I...?" -- even then? Yes, then, too! -- god, there was so much going on, so much guiding you, often imperceptibly, to wherever it was you happened to land. Who knew that "Back in Black" was about a Bad Guy, except everybody (except me), except that they didn't, because they didn't hear it like my son did in the car? There it is, that world where the song's not the same every time you play it, and neither are you.

#personal #chiffon brick motorcade

26 notes · View notes