DeForrest Brown Jr

“been into Kraftwerk and Bam was into Kraftwerk, and we just had the idea of merging the two songs together,” Baker later recalled.75 “He had been hearing those songs all over the city, seemingly from every boombox and car stereo. John Robie, the studio engineer, only used those songs as a starting point for his own synthesizer compositions on the Micromoog and Prophet 5. . . . When we went in to do ‘Planet Rock,’ we were worried that we'd have problems with Kraftwerk, so we did another melody line,” Baker specified, evoking the way he and Soulsonic Force took to building their studio music out of several interchangeable parts.76 Nonetheless, Kraftwerk sued the label Tommy”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture

“an awful lot of sounds to fruition that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to hear.” 77 Yet in an ironic twist of fate, while visiting New York on business around that time, Atkins overhead “Planet Rock” and was both inspired and upset that another act had beat him to the idea of a Black techno-funk sound, noting that Afrika Bambaataa's vision of the future was superior to his own.78 He was inspired to pursue his own Afrofuturist electronic production even further.79 “The advent of MIDI was a real godsend because it enabled different manufacturers’ devices to talk to one another,” explained Atkins. “It was great for us because we didn't necessarily want to use Roland keyboards just because”
― DeForrest Brown Jr, Assembling a Black Counter Culture