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:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
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“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
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“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
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