It's Not Enough - History

History

The song originally started life with music and lyrics by Rachel Fuller, but Pete Townshend liked the music and wrote different lyrics to use for the song that appears on Endless Wire. He later explained the origins of the song: "Watching Le Mepris, the '60s film by Jean Luc Godard starring Brigitte Bardot, I found myself wondering why it is that we choose people to partner who we feel aren't quite right. Bardot asks her lover, 'Do you adore my legs?' He nods. 'My breasts?' He nods. 'My arms?' He nods. She goes over her entire body. He nods every time. When she's finished she gets up and tells him, 'It's not enough'". Bardot and the film 'Le Mepris' are mentioned specifically in the song.

Townshend explained on one of his and Fuller's In The Attic video podcasts that he was worried some people may criticize the song because it was co-written, but he goes on to say that it sounds more like The Who than anything else on the album.

Read more about this topic:  It's Not Enough

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)

    The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    It’s nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I’m bloody close.
    John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)