History
The first track, "Athena", peaked at #28 on the Billboard Pop Singles charts.
The album cover, designed by Graham Hughes, depicts a young boy playing Atari's Space Duel arcade game. It is a reference to Tommy, with the pinball machine that the main character played updated to the times.
In 1997, MCA re-released the album with new mixes for the album correcting problems evident in the original mixes for "Athena" and "Eminence Front".
Pete Townshend has been sometimes noted to give a brief history of "Eminence Front" before playing it in concert. He would explain what the song was about, and finish by saying the album's name ("It's Hard").
Read more about this topic: It's Hard
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“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)