Phrase used by rapper Del the Funkee Homosapien on his album Deltron 3030 that seems to sum up so much of the cultural approach used not only be Del on the album but of a certain set of post-modernistic culture of the late 1990's and the beginning of this decade.
What the exact content of Del's statement is is up for debate. Del uses it on the song "Madness", where he raps:
Simple minded people always point the finger
To bring it to a close as if life is their role, their path
When all paths are intersections
It all depends on the persons perception
I find it an exceptionally interesting statement because Del throws many different
themes on the album as a whole that are hard to exactly track the
locus classicus of. When Del talks about life being a dream, is he referring to, perhaps
The Matrix, or is he referring to
Gun Dream? Or is he referring to
Chuangzi? Are his renegade
mech soldiers taken from the latest
Squaresoft RPG or are they taken all the way from
Qu Yuan? And, after all, which one of his literary and cosmological themes are supreme? Is he interested in life as a gnostic prison, or in reforming the political system?
What is a departure in Del's thinking, as evidenced in this line, is that he seems to reject the general metanarrative tendencies of the black hip-hop community, which has adopted a metanarrative that parallels the metanarrative of the white liberal and radical community in viewing the past 40 years of American history as basically being a struggle between the forces of liberation and the forces of oppression. In rap music, this can take the form of rather sophisticated political commentary, as in the case of Chuck D, or spectacular images of the "inauguration of Satan", as in the case of the Wu-Tang Clan. But in any case, the view of history as a two sided struggle between oppression and liberation is fairly taken for granted in most rap music that has any concerns beyond sex and sex.
What is funny about the Del album is that he takes the idea of a universal apocalypse for granted on his album, but instead of accenting it as a measuring stick for all personal and social interaction, only uses it for a basis to play on a number of topics, including corporate dominance, the future of rap music, thoughts about suicide, the desire to have robot duplicates that can approach women without fear of failure, human nature, and the like, with no one theme being the be all and end all of his message.
So, when we put together a Top 100 list of the best geek rap albums of all time, Del may be there simply because he incorporates so many things into his music: from references to Ghost in the Shell to a song written by the son of the most important boomer musician of all time. But in the end, as Del himself would have it, his album is just one more intersection in a cast cultural history that goes from ideas of ancient China to enlightenment ideas about human progress to modern scientific discoveries to sampling hooks off the albums he himself made when he was still a teenager.