As the group's founder and leader, Byrd stated that his aesthetic aims for the band and album were to form "an avant-garde political/musical rock group with the idea of combining electronic sound (not electronic music)... musical/political radicalism... performance art." According to Moskowitz, the choice of the band name "The United States of America" was intentionally provocative: "Using the full name of the country for something so common as a rock group was a way of expressing disdain for governmental policy. It was like hanging the flag upside down." As well as crediting the influence of Dada-inspired band The Red Crayola, Byrd said:We were very conscious that we were plunging into rock without any real knowledge of, or experience in, the medium. We had played Cage and Stockhausen, African and Indian music, and I thought we could simply bring all that to rock. But we knew almost nothing about the roots of rock and roll. We all improvised, of course, but in a "contemporary music" style. In retrospect, creating a rock band with no rock musicians was a bad decision on my part. Still, since I considered myself the most eclectic composer on the planet, I was confident that whatever the others couldn’t do I could write.