Pete Townshend

In Pete Townshend: The Minstrel's Dilemma, Smith explores the legendary rock auteur's struggle between his own creative impulses and those of the commercial public. Faced with a modern version of the minstrel's dilemma, Townshend is shown as a musician confronting the same battles begun by early minstrels and later fought by composers such as Beethoven and Mozart. Early in his career, Townshend ignored his creative instincts to satisfy commercial agendas, but after his success, he slowly withdrew to resolve his conflict between creativity and commercialism. At the end of his thirty-year struggle he has emerged as a true artist, able to live up to audience expectation while attending to his own artistic impulses.