TOMMY is blind, deaf and dumb. He has been born into a hostile world which neither understands him nor can spare the time to care for him. He believes in Love; but how is a man who has never seen light to be enlightened? He is bullied and mocked, ridiculed and despised. He is sexually molested and put on stage as a freak. Sally, who loves him, is knocked aside by the unseeing Tommy, her face gashed and her tears streaming with blood, Tommy becomes a religious object, worshipped and feared, attributed with the power to achieve miracles.

"I'm free;' he says at last. 'Follow me.' And so we do—to an obscene paradise of senseless debauchery. Welcome, welcome to Tommy's holiday camp. Welcome; he hisses, to a land that you would have created for me. Now, it is you who cannot hear me; you whose ears are sealed; you who are unable to speak. Can you say now that your sight is any more real than mine, or that your voice has any greater eloquence than mine? Welcome. We're going to rape you, forsake you and—best of all—just forget that you ever existed.

Tommy is subject matter and title of an astonishing opera, a parable for our time, mostly by Pete Townshend of The Who, released this week on Track Records 613/013-4. The songs are elementary and elemental, relying on foot-tapping rhythms, uncomplicated harmonic progressions and devastating instrumental expertise—fast flamenco chordal scurryings and flashing snarls on the drums. The scoring is primitive and primeval—spare and cold. It is almost as if the language of music has been bared to its harshest essentials so that the story should stand clear and unmistakable. 'Ours' is music with built-in hatred,' says Townshend.

The hatred is directed against not only the social environment which sponsored and then grew tired of him, but also against the perverse snobbery which damns what he does to the oblivion of freakish irrelevance. How could a layabout like this Pete Townshend possibly write an opera? Artists are nice people whose products live on in museums and libraries. It is against this kind of idiocy that Townshend and his opera are fighting an uphill battle. For all we know, he could have written the greatest music of the twentieth century, but because he has to do with pop music what he does write doesn't stand a chance of a fair hearing.

As it happens, the songs are a strangely haunting mixture of the savagely memorable and the instantly forgettable, of restless tension and of absurd banality. The mastery of counterpoint is everywhere evident, as in the endlessly subtle use of motifs. Live performance of 'Tommy' as an achieved opera is difficult to imagine, given the limitations of what we now conceive of as opera. But maybe pop music will change all that. Maybe pop music—like its embodiment, Tommy—will move into a position of power that will enable it to mock at those who have previously mocked it.