After the bands' earlier releases, Clinton began to feel that something more conceptual was in order, and he expressed deep admiration for The Who's "Tommy" and The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as "the classiest two pieces of music I had ever seen where everything related to each other. So I wanted to do one of those kinds of things." Clinton settled on the extraterrestrial concept because of its originality, saying, "Put niggas in places that you don't usually see 'em. And "nobody" had seen 'em on no spaceships! Once you seen 'em sittin' on spaceships like it was Cadillac then it was funny, cool."