Motor-Booty Affair

Parliament continued putting the world’s mythologies in the service of the funk with The Motor-Booty Affair. Built around a party set in the underwater city of Atlantis, the album matches its grooves — the nine-minute glide of “Deep,” the chant of “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop)” — with a loose storyline and bad puns (the booty-admiring “Rumpofsteelskin”) that communicate through the gleefully cartoonish aesthetic. Even with a joke about ’70s soul’s zodiac fixation (“You’re a Fish (And I’m a Water Sign)”), though, the music is nothing to poke fun at. From “Aqua Boogie,” the record’s single, to “Liquid Sunshine,” which might have been counted as a throwaway if it weren’t one of the most sonically intricate things on the album, the messages are put across in the context of a nonstop jam that any sympathetic listener would find hard to reject.