That's a difficult question to answer, because there is a very good chance you and I would draw different lines on where things shift into being pretentious. Intellectualism is more than mere intelligence, it's an attitude that embraces reason above emotion, and gives the impression of looking down on those who prefer to wallow in the shallow end of the theoretical brain vat. And yes, I realize just by making that allusion I am feeding into the perception.
The case for being an intellectual is obvious. I studied philosophy in college, and at one point wrote a twenty-page paper to work through my one original philosophical theory (which I have touched on over the years here) merely for the fun of it. As you have seen in the essays I post here, I find myself often thinking through the ramifications of the music we listen to, what our tastes say about ourselves, and how art can both explain and even define the people we are. That I can drop a pun about Duchamp and douche-bags is entirely in line with my personality.
The case for not being an intellectual is also obvious. I am the sort of person who claims Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman as my favorite artists, and the shapers of my identity. I listen to Steinman inserting 'boner lines' into several of his songs, and I find it stupidly charming. Depending on the day, I can still recite between most and all of the lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire", which might be the single dumbest song ever written.
I wouldn't be helping the case to say we could look at this through utilitarian means, adding up the points on either side, which I think tells the whole story. While I am not generally the haughty type, and I have more than my share of moments where I go for the cheap option, I cannot deny that I prefer to actually use my brain.
There was a point in my life when I considered myself a Slayer fan. Not to any massive degree, but I enjoyed Slayer more than anyone who knew me would have assumed. Over the years, as the electricity running through the synapses in my mind has broken in my patterns of thought, Slayer has become a friction that now rubs me the wrong way. There's a specific point that illustrates this shift, which comes from the "God Hates Us All" album. In college, that was a record I listened to quite a bit, which is the sort of thing I shouldn't say out loud anymore.
They have a song called "Payback" on that record, which is a song that makes me question if evolution is theoretical like time travel, in that they can both go backwards. Kerry King writes, "Fuck you and your progress, watch me fucking regress." Nothing I can say will ever sum up Slayer's career better than that line. The man known how to be brutal.
The bigger point is there came a time when I simply couldn't put up with the pride Slayer felt for their ignorance. The same person who still gets a chuckle out of the name-dropping of Cracker Jack on "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad" can't listen to Slayer explicitly write about beating people until they're lifeless carcasses anymore (to say nothing of Carcass, whose medical dictionary lyricism is the type of pseudo-intellectualism that gives actual thinking a bad name). To be more clever than Slayer has ever been in their lives, there comes a time when being so blunt means you can't make a point.
I've come to realize the mere fact I am writing these words, that I have given any thought at all to this issue, means that I most likely am an intellectual at heart. Perhaps I have always known this, but didn't want to admit it for the simple reason that I have known so few other people who fit the bill. To use an analogy from wrestling history, I will ask; Did you think the better story was Stone Cold giving his boss the finger, or Bret Hart blurring the line between heroism and villainy based on nothing but geography? The answer to that tells us everything, I suppose.
It was the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who said intelligence is a 'curse', because it will lead to isolation and suffering. I'm tempted to believe in the psychological concept of the collective unconscious, because often it feels like much of humanity is pulling from the same well of mental resources, which would explain why there is so little to go around for each one of them.
I'm not saying that music must aim for the highest of brows. Some of my own songs were written about concepts such as the creation of the concept of fate as a rationalization to avoid the slings and arrows shot our way for having outrageous fortune (See, there I go paraphrasing "Hamlet"), or how inertia in our lives can make the past and future synonyms that make change a word that only exists in the language of our dreams, but we don't need to go to that extreme.
If it makes me an intellectual to want to be able to listen to music without feeling insulted by some of the language that gets used, I cannot deny the label. Whether it comes from songs that clearly have no intentional meaning behind them, no ability to communicate beyond an elementary school education, or an embrace of backwards social attitudes, I want something more from my music. Perhaps that explains why I have connected to so little of it over these last couple of years. The ways the world has shifted have made music more disposable, which has not been conducive to deeper thought.
So what does an intellectual do when he is given so little to think about?
I suppose he thinks about the lack of thought. The vicious circle continues. Ignorance may truly be bliss.
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