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the Trojan.'" In a postmodern media culture, there is evident pleasure in quotation, sampling, and mixing material from different sources and eras. Houston Baker accordingly describes rap as "postmodern" by virtue of its "nonauthoritative collaging or archiving of sound and styles that bespeaks a deconstructive hybridity. Linearity and progress yield to a dizzying synchronicity" (1993: 89). Like other postmodern artistic products, rap is eclectic and pastiche-oriented, and subverts modernist notions of authorship. But from the perspective of Jameson's concept of postmodern culture, marked by depthlessness, the absence of affect, the disintegration of the authorial voice, and so on, rap appears to be modernist in form. Creating highly expressive modernist collage, the best rappers have distinct voices, styles, and messages, often related to modern politics. Thus, rap draws on both modernist and postmodernist strategies and is between the modern and the postmodern (for further explication of this claim, see Kellner 1995: 147f). A Sense of Time and Place When listening to rap, one immediately notices that it is a form of articulating identity and self-assertion. The rap artists frequently call attention to their origins, usually grounded in a particular region like South Central Los Angeles, the Bronx, or Compton; thus there is a highly articulated awareness and sense of place in rap music. In particular, rap is frequently a music of the 'hood, that arises from distinct neighborhoods where identification with place supplements the strong identification with race and is certainly stronger than identification with the nation. Rap also functions as a means of affirming and constructing individual identities for the group or rap artist. This identity may border on narcissism and a materialism that brags of its record sales and material possessions, as well as a macho bravado that boasts of being kick-ass tough, but it is also a key mode of assertion in an environment hostile to any form of African-American self-expression. It also situates the rap a rtists in their specific milieu, gaining identity and authenticity from being located in a specific space and time. Rappers also frequently state the time in which they are rapping ("Ice-T, 1991, mother fucker, you should have killed me last year"). They are frequently asking the question, "What time is it?" and answering: Time to Wake Up! Flavor Flav of Public Enemy wears a clock around his neck and rappers situate their work in a specific time and place, often signalled in music videos by newspapers, graffiti, or graphics, as well as the lyrics. Rap tells us that it is the time of conflicts between the dominant and subordinate race, gender and class forces, that it is time for change, that it may be the fire this time, that apocalypse is on the horizon, that its time for change. Thus, rap undercuts the placelessness, timelessness, and contextlessness of much popular music, especially the schizophrenic play of signifiers of music video, with a drive to contextualize, narrativize, and signify. The rap singer wants you to know who she or he is, where they are from, what time it is now, and what is happening. The images of the music videos show specific urban sites, often the ghettos of the underclass. Ice T's videos of the songs in "Original Gangster" show him in the 'hood, experiencing the stories he narrates in his songs, as do many videos of N.W.A., Ice Cube and other ghetto-based ra