"a seminal, if incredibly obscure, 1985 album by Jeff Phelps"

Seminal, strictly speaking would be if the record had, you know, sired anything surely? Led to anything?

It's a Dam Funk favourite apparently

(which to me is a negative endorsement honestly)

but you know, credit where due, Dam Funk has apparently done a record with Steve Arrington, which is thoroughly laudable, in so far as Arrington's first couple of solo records were great (a David Stubbs favourite back when he was a deejay) and Slave, the band he was in, were a major funk force, actually popular, lots of hits on the Billboard R&B charts

But the distortions of hipster culture are such that many of the people who will rally to this desperately minor release by Mr Phelps will never have heard, oooh, SOS Band, or Vicki D, or Loose Ends, or Heatwave or Rick James's Cold Blooded -- it's quite possible none of them will ever have bothered to hear an Earth Wind and Fire or Stevie Wonder album

such mainstream black pop records will never achieve hipster currency because they were too successful... too many copies of them exist in the world to become rare... but on every level they trounce the obscurer-than-thou stuff.... just as with most minimal synth you'd be better off listening to Soft Cell, most cosmic analogue obscurities you'd be better off with a Jean-Michel Jarre LP, and so on....

but in this particular instance judge for yourself