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Marvin Gaye had some ideas about the relationship between religion, romance and sex. His biographer David Ritz reports the following remark from Gaye upon meeting the teenage woman who became his wife, and would obsess his work from the hyper-erotic Lets Get It On until the end of his life: I saw her as more than a real girl. She suddenly appeared as a gift from God.

In some of his most emotionally candid music, Gaye articulated the idea of sexual fulfilment as a kind of salvation. The son of a preacher who would eventually take his life Gaye sang songs in praise of women in a voice that expressed ethereal certitude and honeyed earthly innuendo in equal parts. Lets Get It On made explicit the coded messages that soul had been sending out for years. Parallels between love, sex and a sublime state of spiritual connection had infused and dramatized the evolution of soul, a form born of the meeting of black gospel and black blues, the spirit and the body organically connected in the search for higher ground; it is there in the work of Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack, Al Green, Aretha Franklin and a million more.

Funk grew out of soul, a militant, arrogant, madcap and more worldly progeny that influenced a big part of Princes seventies adolescence. It openly celebrated the physical aspects of black culture that had always been there, sublimated in dance; no big deal, but they had scared the hell out of those guardians of white morality who thought sex was only for making babies, and not for showing love and having fun. Funk was about The Body: how it looked, what it did, all the hot, nasty, lovely, smelly things about it. God would have to shake His ass, or just stay home.

What Prince did with funk was remind it, curiously, of the sacredness it had left behind. He reintroduced the libido to the Holy Ghost. The