Since the early 2000s, Moroccan hip hop artists have had access to a national audience via radio, television, and festivals throughout the country. The best-known artists authenticate themselves both to fans, by adroitly adapting the latest transnational trends in the genre’s music and fashion, and to skeptics, by weaving references to cherished Sufi and popular musical traditions into their compositions. In the context of discourses about music’s morality and effects shared by most Moroccan Muslims, in which embodied listening does signi?cant ethical work, hip hop practitioners’ performance and listening practices create the conditions for a counterpublic (Hirschkind 2006, Warner 2002) at once ethical and open to wide variations in expressions of piety. Learning through listening together (Kapchan 2009) in performances, rehearsals, recording and listening sessions allows musicians and audience alike members to undertake the affective work necessary to form a counterpublic, however ephemeral, with its own comportment, expressions, and values. This paper argues that this counterpublic most frequently performs political quietism through, not despite, Moroccan practitioners’ embrace of the transnational hip hop tradition’s normative ideology of critique and opposition as both a stylistic and an ethical goal. Analyses of live musical performance and quotidian performances of cultural competence and affiliation demonstrate that this emergent hip hop counterpublic links its trenchant systemic critiques to discourses of personal responsibility, shifting the response to issues like inequality, corruption, and police brutality from the domain of the political to that of the personal. By casting solutions to these problems in ethical terms, hip hop performances invoke the rights and responsibilities of individual citizens, rather than older political or class-based solidarities, encouraging each practitioner to take him- or herself as the terrain of change and improvement. While Islamist and activist emcees have gained niche audiences since early 2011, Morocco’s most famous hip hop musicians do politics by appearing to mistrust and eschew the political, performing to the state’s vision of moderate, cosmopolitan Muslim citizens.