Omarion - Forgot About Love (The Awakening, 2011)

There is a literal point where the world does end. It happens around two o’clock. You’re dancing, then you’re not. You see your surroundings, then they’re gone. And when you wake up, everything around you looks half-destroyed – that is, if you’re lucky enough to wake up in the same place you fell asleep. The world has vanished and come back, if only for a few lost hours. The little apocalypse.

Katherine St. Asaph has put up an essay called “Till the World Ends” and pop’s apocalypse longings, from which the above quote comes. It’s excellent and well worth your time. Katherine’s central thesis is that “just about every single on the charts takes girls’ dark feelings and makes them even darker,” that pop music is engaged in a partying-as-nihilism arms race that sounds grim even when it’s supposed to be celebratory.

Omarion seems to have intuited this, and “Forgot About Love,” from his DJ Drama-assisted mixtape The Awakening [free download], acts as a response. Produced by UK Funky standard bearers Crazy Cousinz, the tune vacillates between eerie electronic gloom, and a cascade of widescreen, optimistic harmonies. On the face of it, the song seeks to make amends for the singer’s wandering eye — “Spend so much time in the club, seem like we forgot about love” — though it doesn’t take much imagination to perceive it as an apology from pop itself. It’s time to leave the club, Omarion is saying, and go home to our loved ones.