Charlie eats one ticketless Wonka bar and then gives up and becomes a stevedore's apprentice. A drab life is a willful pathology. There is more available wonder than you can possibly apprehend, and it floods in through anything unsealed. Records want to paralyze you with joy. Expecting nothing from an album is an affront to which it may well be compelled to respond.
Ambivalence is even more intolerable.
I liked Happylove , the first Star Ghost Dog album, OK, but it reminded me a lot of Veruca Salt's American Thighs , which I thought self-consciousness hamstrung. Veruca Salt went on to make Eight Arms to Hold You , but that required hiring Bob Rock and going to Hawaii and probably accepting a Faustian constraint about breaking up before making another record. You can't just hire a new rhythm section and hope that it will make your pop songs epic. I still remember seeing Star Ghost Dog for the first time, as one of three opening acts for some weekday schedule-filler, and thinking, as I watched Ginny Weaver negotiate warily with her microphone, that I'd probably sound lifeless, too, if I hadn't eaten in a month. Emaciation to catharsis is just too far.