dirge

A psychedelic dirge but also a love song, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” captured a 1960s spirit of yin-yang duality — much like the band’s name itself.

But after he warns, “Don’t tell no lie about me/And I won’t tell truths about you,” the track changes to a tolling, droning trap dirge and Lamar’s delivery becomes biting, nasal and percussive.

As the score howls with chant-like dirges, blood, sweat and out-of-bounds fears grip the hapless heroine while spooky, shrouded nuns engage in satanic rituals that place her in very dire circumstances.

The piece begins as a slow dirge, then accelerates into a kind of battle charge — the episode climaxes in a call to war for the latent rebels in Ferrix.

But in that exhausted frenzy the young man finally started to write — and ended up with the landmark modernist poem “Easter in New York,” a citywide dirge of darkly beautiful alexandrines.