For some comic aficionados, the phrase “So long, Pop! I’m off to check my tiger trap!” bears an Anna Karenina-like weight. The words are the first lines of Calvin and Hobbes, spoken by Calvin moments before he discovers Hobbes, lured to the trap by tuna fish bait. Some might argue that Hobbes’s abiding love for tuna, and Calvin’s loyal attachment to Hobbes, render Bill Watterson’s strip an unparalleled portrait of the heart’s capacity for commitment, but the thing is, of course, Hobbes isn’t real: only a stuffed animal could love us so dearly. The only tigers that don’t abandon us are the tigers we imagine.
Thus Tiger Trap—the early 90s twee-pop band, formed by high school friends Angie Loy, Heather Dunn, Jen Bruan, and Rose Melberg—draws more than its name from Watterson’s strip, culling their awareness of illusory attachment, and the persistence of desire in the face of that illusion, from a story about a boy and the tiger he loved. Nowhere on their 1993 self-titled debut album do the girls of Tiger Trap live up to their namesake as on the heartbreakingly consolatory “For Sure.” Like most Tiger Trap songs, Melberg’s vocals are mixed low, and what holds center stage on first listen are the cheerful, speedy guitar, and the insistent drums. The eager rattle of Dunn’s cymbals sounds like summer, like the promise of going on a good frolic with your tiger, but Melberg’s plaintive vocals dissolve this dizziness. “I’d rather be without you than be anything like her,” she sings, yet we know it can’t be true: we want to believe in that guitar, but the girl sounds too forlorn. It’s hard to stay cool about breaking up when you’re all broken up inside, when all you want is to be her instead of you.
If “For Sure” reminds us that saying you’re over that jerk before you’re over him or her is an integral and creatively fruitful part of the process of, you know, actually getting over that jerk, then Tullycraft’s 1996 hit “Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend’s Too Stupid To Know About” may be this genre’s archetypal anthem. The guy’s lost the girl, but at least he still has the records: “It’s okay for a sunny day but that Sting album won’t do / So when I play you Allen Clapp, you’ll know baby I love you,” and the words are more cheered than sung. The song is one about giving each other songs, about what we trade in when we’re falling in and out of love. In the end, though, Allen Clapp will only get you so far: you might build a better mixtape, but that doesn’t matter if nobody’s listening.