In 2003, aiming to understand the scope of Egypt’s cassette industry, I set out to systematically map the network of popular music production and consumption in Egypt since the 1970s. Who produced music media? How many copies were sold or broadcast? Where, when, and to whom? I sought hard, comprehensive data: statistics, lists, taxonomies, and maps. This quantitative study, initially intended as a baseline to more in-depth interpretive, ethnographic research, soon became an all-consuming exercise entailing teamwork and considerable frustration, albeit not entirely without fruit. Unlike libraries or newspaper archives, popular culture archives are mostly informal – not designated for research, viewed as too lowbrow, too economically or politically sensitive, or too personal to warrant scholarship. They are thus often overseen by guardians who (for different reasons) treat researchers with suspicion, particularly when they are foreigners. However, in retrospect the many micro-struggles along this decade-long journey around Cairo—from offices of the Ministry of Culture (the Production Sector; the Censor for Artistic Works; the Opera) to those of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (e.g. Radio, SonoCairo), from small cassette shop owners (including a survey of some 25 Greater Cairo neighborhoods), to record labels (international, regional, national, local) and unlicensed distributors; from intellectual property rights organizations, local (SACERAU) and global (IFPI), to Egypt’s Chamber of Commerce; from fan clubs to private collectors--turned out to harbor considerable ethnographic value. I meticulously recorded stories of my travails in ethnographic fieldnotes, including reflections on relationships to archival actors and materials, and it is this data, more than the collected materials themselves, that form the core of my paper. Practically speaking, an ethnography of informal archive access is instructive. More importantly, the agent-level interactions of a foreigner and Egypt’s information guardians (whether they be bureaucrats or broadcasters, record company employees or shop owners) shed light upon the larger cultural, social, economic and political systems in which they are all embedded, and upon one’s relationship—as a foreign researcher and de facto representative of foreign cultures and polities--to those systems. Deploying an autoethnographic strategy, in conjunction with Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a heuristic connecting the social and the material, and observing Latour’s injunction to “trudge like an ant”, I recount this decade-long journey (2003 to 2013) and what can be gleaned from it, methodologically and socioculturally, towards enhancing our understanding of popular culture and the Middle East.