In his book “Syria’s Democratic Years. Citizens, Experts, and Media in the 1950s,” Kevin Martin shows how popular culture/radio served as a site for the formulation of postcolonial developmentalism and the edifice of political culture. Similarly, the history of Radio al-Sharq (later al-īdhāʿa al-lubnānia), Lebanon’s first official radio station, provides new pathways into exploring the nexus between political and popular culture in the country’s early stages of national independence. What aspirations and visions of Lebanon and the Middle East underpin popular culture, including songs, films, comedic monologues and advertisements, after independence from French mandate rule? What critiques of politics and society are diffused in popular culture? What role does popular culture play in postcolonial political and cultural developmentalism? These are questions I seek to approach through a close reading of al-īdhāʿa, the official print-outlet of the radio station. The magazine is a prolific source for research of radio and popular culture in the Middle East between the 1930s and 1960s. Advertisements, op-eds, cultural critiques, listeners’/readers’ letters, reports chronicling artistic performances in Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, and portraits of stars fill the pages of the al-īdhāʿa. Drawing on the magazine opens a window into the politics of the radio, a central medium for the production, dissemination, and debate of popular culture. Initially established by French colonial authorities in 1938, Radio al-Sharq was under the administrative purview of the postcolonial Lebanese state (Ministry of Information) after national independence and remained the main radio station broadcasting from Lebanon until the late 1940s; Forming simultaneously an authoritative institution of the postcolonial state and being a cultural agent, the radio station’s print-outlet constitutes a point of crystallization for the production of popular culture, notions of postcolonial developmentalism and the negotiation of what ought to be Lebanon and its role in the Middle East after colonial rule.