Looking for the Perfect Beat

Arthur Baker and John Robie produced it as the follow-up to Planet Rock, with Tom Silverman as executive producer. Silverman decided Planet Rock was successful enough to need a follow-up. Baker felt the group needed a different approach, since everyone was copying what they had done, and he said they could not go anywhere near the tempo or beat of Planet Rock. He and Robie worked on it in Robie's apartment while Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force were on tour. The title came to Baker as he developed the track: they were looking for the perfect beat, and had already found it. G.L.O.B.E. wrote the lyrics, and Baker performed the vocals the rappers refused to do, among them Beat This and the stuttering of Looking for the per-. Years later he said Beat This was almost a taunt at Sylvia Robinson, a challenge to Sugar Hill.

Bambaataa said sampling really arrived with this record, when the Emulator machine came out. The 12-inch released in December 1982 carried a vocal version of 6:56, an instrumental of 6:58 and a short track called Bonus Beats II. NME placed it 13th among the tracks of 1983, and Robert Palmer of the New York Times named it his top single of 1983, calling it a small symphony in rap rhythms. Lloyd Bradley of NME wrote that it was the most enduring and interesting electronic funk around. Christgau wrote that the way it digests and funkifies the technofuturism of Planet Rock was electrohop's transcendent moment. It is the second track on Planet Rock: The Album, in its original 12-inch version of 7:03.