When The Who released Tommy 50 years ago today, they introduced fans to a new form: the rock opera. They weren't the first to establish a narrative on a record—but they popularized the idea of blending the "high art" of the classical form with the "low art" of rock 'n' roll using the bombast and intensity of the music itself to tell an ambitious story. As Pete Townshend told Rolling Stone in 1968 while teasing Tommy, "so much depends on the music, so much." ("I’m hoping that we can do it," he said. "The lyrics are going to be okay, but every pitfall of what we’re trying to say lies in the music, lies in the way we play the music, the way we interpret, the way things are going during the opera.")
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Tommy itself tells the story of a deaf, dumb, and blind boy who suffers neglect and abuse and struggles to recover his senses. The Who had already enjoyed success with their "mini-opera" "A Quick One, While He's Away" in 1966 by the time Pete Townshend started writing Tommy, and on 1970's Live At Leeds album he introduces the song as "Tommy's parents." But while "A Quick One, While He's Away" is confined to nine minutes, Tommy is a sprawling double-LP with a complicated narrative. Instrumentals like "Sparks" and "Underture" sit comfortably among favorites like "I'm Free" and "Pinball Wizard," and in 1975 it was adapted into a star-studded, trippy movie that featured Tina Turner killing it as The Acid Queen, Elton John performing on stilts and, perhaps most famously, Ann-Margaret writhing around in baked beans.With that in mind it's easy to see why records like this could be deemed pretentious or overblown, but Tommy's success established a format that's endured over half a century. Groups spanning a number of subgenres like Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Fucked Up, and even more recently, Long Island glam duo The Lemon Twigs have all put their twist on it in the ensuing decades.Unlike a rock musical—apologies to Hair and RENT—rock operas stand on their own, serving as first and foremost an album and telling their stories exclusively through the music. (Though many have been adapted for the stage or screen over the years.) While what exactly separates a concept album from a rock opera remains up for debate—we're going with self-identification for the purposes of this list; if the artist calls it a rock opera, it's a rock opera— some of the best examples of the style are the ones that embrace the pomp and theatrics the format calls for. Whether it's the tale of a deaf, dumb, and blind kid or the bombing of a lightbulb factory, rock operas are ambitious, which you almost have to commend an artist for simply attempting. So to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tommy, here are nine more highlights from the genre.
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The Pretty Things, S.F. Sorrow (1968)
The Who, Quadrophenia (1973)
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Lou Reed, Berlin (1973)
Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell (1977)
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Pink Floyd, The Wall (1979)
Frank Zappa, Joe's Garage (1979)
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Green Day, American Idiot (2004)
My Chemical Romance, The Black Parade (2006)
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“The Black Parade is an epic, theatrical, orchestral, big record that is also a concept album that has a very set story in it," frontman Gerard Way told MTV in 2006. "But also, as you listen to the album, the layers of that story peel away, and what you're left with in the end is a story about mortality."This ambitious project from Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up features a meta-narrative in which main character David Eliade comes to realize he is a character in a story after a factory bombing gone wrong leads to the death of his girlfriend Veronica; he eventually fights narrator Octavio St. Laurent over control of his plot. It's a deeply complicated concept, but it's extremely well-executed, with frontman Damian Abraham's raw shouts juxtaposed nicely with more melodic guest vocals from Jennifer Castle, Madeline Follin and Kurt Vile. It's a big swing, for sure, and it's one that paid off for Fucked Up, earning the band a Polaris Prize nomination and giving them their first charting album in the US."I'm pretty open with calling [David Comes To Life] a rock opera," Abraham told Consequence of Sound in 2011. "I think there’s less pretension to rock opera than a concept record—and I think the term 'concept record' is almost a cop-out. You can say any record is a 'concept record,' you can find a concept with any record, where if you call it rock opera you are definitely making a commitment to the form."