After a few seconds of heavily reverbed lipsmacking slurps, the voice spills out in wild panning stereo: “If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions.” Starting a new and definitive phase of a career with a declaration of pornographic metaphysics is how ’50s doo-wop singer and ’60s Motown aspirant George Clinton launched an empire of funk, and there’s no mistaking his band’s debut for anything other than the first salvo in an already characteristic assault on tired morals and square-assedness in general. Even if Funkadelic hadn’t fully established who Funkadelic were — Bootsy and Bernie hadn’t made their mark yet, and many of the songs feature Motown session players (including uncredited appearances from Funk Brothers alumni Dennis Coffey, Bob Babbitt, and bandleader Earl Van Dyke) — just what they were is clear from the get-go. “By the way, my name is Funk,” intones Clinton in that opening cut, elliptically answering the titular question “Mommy, What’s A Funkadelic?”, adding on the well-that-explains-it statement “I am not of your world.” Even while rattling off come-ons while floating along to a riff that doses “Whole Lotta Love” with some Real Good Shit, the wordplay-laden digressions and trickster sloganeering reveal a wise (and wise-ass) depth that one-upped every ad sales pitch on TV (“Let me play with your emotions/ For nothing is good unless you play with it”). By the time you’re faced with “What Is Soul?”, the other question bookending this album, answers like “a hamhock in your Corn Flakes” and “a joint rolled in toilet paper” make all the sense in the world.

Between those two queries lie two of P-Funk’s earliest triumphs. “I Bet You” was a foot in the door, lent to the Jackson 5 that same year as an ABC album cut as an offering to Motown’s post-Cloud Nine psychedelic dabblings but pushed here to its canyon-deep, in-the-red limits through six minutes of fevered intensity that established the colossal neck-snap thump of drummer Tiki Fulwood and slyly hinted at the future virtuoso depths of Eddie Hazel. The other watershed moment, the Fuzzy Haskins-penned “I Got A Thing, You Got A Thing, Everybody’s Got A Thing,” is like watching a volcano erupt: a burbling glow of harmonic soul calling for solidarity despite social differences crests into a thousand-degree explosion of Fulwood-propelled funk power. Add on some powerful connections to the old blues roots — “Music For My Mother,” “Good Old Music,” and “Qualify & Satisfy” slot neatly somewhere between Wilson Pickett and Cream — and it epitomizes the notion of the all-killer-no-filler LP for the R&B world. Psychedelic soul had been done before, but never so heavily, so wildly, or so deeply in tune with a future few were so committed to both seeing and creating. Even at this early stage, Funkadelic perfectly split the difference between Jimi Hendrix and Sly & The Family Stone in a year where both artists were lost to tragic death and studio solitude respectively. They didn’t just fill that gap, they carved their own niche. And it’d only grow wider from there.