POP MUSIC is not art; most of the time it doesn’t even pretend to be. It is low-level kitsch, a fabulous fad factory, the producer of an extra rhythmic giggle on the way to the grave.

It is also a brutal, cold business in which swarms of rock bands form, re-form and pre-form their dizzying, amoebic gyrations in hopes that some day, they, too, might grab that golden record.

But once in a while, out of this crazy scramble of hundreds of young performers, a group may try to move the music business toward high level kitsch, or even the creation of a lasting work. And when that group says, "We have always tried to push rock as far as it will go," it deserves some notice.

One such group is The Who, a four-man British band which, like many another combo, has been living in the shadows of The Beatles.

Since 1965, The Who has been a sort of known-unknown group, making its way in the business by recording such non-million-selling hits as "I Can See for Miles," "Magic Bus" and "Generation" (Hope I Die Before I Get Old," they sang).

Their publicity credits them with inventing several pop art fashions (wearing the British flag as jackets or sticking black tape on white sweaters) and high-decibel feedback (causing a guitar amplifier to go insane).

BUT MOSTLY they were known as the most violent group in rock.

Their concerts usually ended with the musical destruction of guitars, drum heads and sticks, and their fans were like bullfight aficionados lusting after the supreme moment. The sound of an electronic guitar being smashed to dust while still wired to its amplifier was supposed to be beyond the auditory experience of ordinary humans.

They were the nihilists, the anarchists of rock, and so many their destructiveness said something about our time or their world or music or who knows what.

Their lead philosopher, writer and guitar buster, Peter Townshend, once thought, "The current big, imperishable, holy art is pop music, and the break-up routine really says something about it. The ideal, of course, would be for me to get killed in an airplane crash right after a stupendous performance."

That was in the mid ’60s, however, and in a very short time The Who tired of destructiveness. Besides, the instruments cost a lot of money.

ABOUT TWO years ago, they began to form a hazy idea which, hopefully, would be so audacious that they would never engage in demolition again. The Who, they figured, would create some sort of musical impression of man’s physical experience, a musical trip into his senses, perhaps even an opera.

Even to conceive of the attempt must have been frightening. When The Who talked of it, The Beatles agreed not to work on their own operatic efforts until they had heard The Who’s product.

The result of The Who’s labors was released recently. It is called "Tommy," and it is a 90-minute opera that unfortunately probably will never be performed in an opera house. It is a pure rock creation meaning you can dance, wriggle or finger-snap to each tune.

And yet it has such firm philosophic underpinnings that it is the deepest and most intellectual work yet attempted by a rock group. "Tommy" will create new trends.

TOMMY IS A child made traumatically deaf, dumb and blind after he sees his father kill his mother’s lover.

The opera follows his life through torture by Cousin Kevin ("how would you feel if I turned on the bath, ducked your head under and started to laugh?"), attempted cure with LSD, a seduction by his Uncle Ernie (the song is titled "Fiddle About"), to some small fame as a "Pinball Wizard," scoring well because he plays by feel.

Tommy stares at a mirror and a doctor says he can see. His mother breaks the mirror in a rage and suddenly Tommy is cured. Overnight he becomes a religious sensation, people flock to him, Uncle Ernie capitalizes on his fame by opening Tommy’s Holiday Camp, but Tommy tells the people there that, to follow his way, they must plug their ears and play pinball games. The chorus refuses and wrecks the camp, leaving Tommy to sing:

"Listening to you I get the music, Gazing at you I get the heat. Following you I climb the mountain, I get excitement at your feet!"

Because of the popularity of "Pinball Wizard" as a single record and the expected sales from "Tommy," The Who are now at the apex of their popularity.

BEFORE A show in Chicago, in their individual motel rooms, each member of The Who talked about himself and his work.

Townshend, 24, the group’s thinker, likened The Who to a commando unit in which "one guy does the neckbreaking, another does the bayoneting, others do the kicking or the bridge-blowing. It’s the same with The Who. John Entwistle is the anchorman and the specialist in childhood menace (he wrote "Cousin Kevin" and "Fiddle About.") Keith Moon is the total lunatic, the adrenalin rush, the pituitary gland. Roger Daltrey is the guts of the band, the soul and the nerves.

"Basically, I’m the mouthpiece. As a group, we make a man. As individuals, we don’t count much at all," he explained.

His descriptions proved precise.

DALTREY, 24, the lead singer, and the only unmarried member of The Who, vacillates between seriousness and immaturity. He wears catskin pants with Indian-style fringes down the seams and a huge cross on a chain around his neck. Being on stage, for him, is "the main reason for being in the bloody group."

Entwistle, pushing 25, the calm and somewhat reserved bassist, says that "Tommy" is just the story about "a deaf, dumb and blind boy makes good."

Moon, the stick busting, drum-head-ripping, mischievous maniac, agrees.

"Tommy" was Townshend’s idea and it was his prodding that led to the opera.

TOWNSHEND, long-nosed, lean-faced, hair all down in ringlets, said:

"It’s about the life of a highly spiritually aware person. Tommy goes as high as he can go as a human being and becomes united with all the forces of God, the creator, and the universal consciousness. The people around him build him into a messianic figure, but Tommy realizes that in order to get them back to their own lives, he must sacrifice his image.

"People are flocking to him by the millions, but he knows that won’t do any good if the people concerned are only out for a cheap trip to what they imagine is heaven, paradise or salvation. The only way to attain that is by working for it as an individual. So the people reject him and leave him more or less deaf, dumb and blind, and as lonely as before, despite the fact that he is obviously on a much higher plane. So he sings a hymn, ’Listening to You, I Get the Music,’ a hymn to God, really.

"The opera," said Townshend, "is a mixture of reading Christianity and teaching of Meher Baba, the philosopher who died in February and who was an important figure because his books, like ’God Speaks,’ are simple and straightforward and don’t muck about with rules. I really haven’t got a religion. Maybe, brotherhood. The only real religion is the one we’ve got laid out in front of us and that is our God and the thing is just to live that life."

When told later of what Pete said, John urged his sneaky little mustache, "I know what Pete is trying to get over, but I can’t identify with it."

Keith agreed. "None of us wear Meher Baba badges. Rock is fun. I want to avoid it being too heavy, with everyone walking about saying it’s all religious."

In fact, Townshend’s philosophy is not made completely clear in the opera’s text. And the opera is far from the definitive major rock work. The rhythms tend to be repetitive, some of the tunes slip into the banal and a few do not quite fit, as if they had been in someone’s files for a while and then inserted into the opera. But the thought, obvious care and some beautiful acoustic guitar riffs make this album a milestone.