In 1974, the Ohio Players went on Soul Train to play a new song called “Skin Tight.” After introducing the band members by name and astrological sign, band member Clarence Satchell took questions from the audience, including a woman named Vicky, who asked how they would classify their sound. “Smart,” Satchell replied. He’d just just gotten off the stage after playing a song that opened with the line, “You’re a bad, bad missus/In them skin-tight britches.” But where Parliament had its interstellar mythologies, and Sly and the Family Stone its messages of social progress, the Ohio Players played funk as pure body music: tough, pleasurable, grounded, and direct. Intellectual? Maybe not. But, like a perfectly fitted suit or a clean new haircut, very smart. The band had moved from Westbound Records to Mercury—who’d been promised that the Ohio Players had 40 songs ready to go. In truth, the group’s reserves were empty. So most of Skin Tight was improvised in the studio during a nine-day period in which the band shuttled back and forth between gigs on the east coast, and recording in Chicago. There was no time to think, and even less time to overthink. When Sugarfoot Bonner sings, “I played hooky from school just to be with you” on “Jive Turkey,” it’s probably because he plays hooky from school to be with you. And when he sings about “the sweet and sour taste of love” in “Heaven Must Be Like This”—well, that’s just filthy, but not inaccurate. But for however libidinal the themes on Skin Tight might have been, the music was intricate and eclectic, bringing together bits of jazz (“Streakin’ Cheek to Cheek”), hard rock (“Jive Turkey”), ballads (“Heaven Must Be Like This”), and gospel (“Is Anybody Gonna Be Saved?”) in ways that opened new spaces in Black music and pop in general. Funk was still a four-letter word, but Skin Tight wrote poetry with it.