In 1959, the American writer Paul Bowles secured a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to record folk music of Morocco. Bowles presented his project as a “fight against time” to rescue rural Amazigh traditions from both the rising tides of modernization and the Arabization policies of the newly independent Moroccan government. Recently re-released in collaboration with the Library of Congress, Bowles’s Music of Morocco is now praised by both Western writers and the Moroccan government as a daring act of preservation. But of course, Bowles’s recordings of “purely autochthonous” Berber music were anything but authentic and untouched. The archive resulting from this project is a political text reflecting both Bowles’s own idiosyncratic Orientalism and the cultural policies of colonial and postcolonial governments. While French administrators, Arab nationalists, and Bowles himself held differing views of the proper role of Amazigh people in Moroccan identity, they shared in the construction of an Arab-Berber dichotomy which violently erased hybrid and heterodox cultural forms. The collection and recording of indigenous musical practices usurped meaning-making power from local artists and placed it in the hands of men like Bowles eager to deploy ‘Berber culture’ for their own rhetorical purposes. Bowles sought out “primitive” music, which he saw as the most authentic, and characterized hybrid styles as “schizophrenic” or “ethnically degenerate.” A close reading of the archival notes reveals that Moroccan musicians performed at the whims of Bowles and local government officials, often for meager compensation and sometimes under threat of violence. Although historians have begun to use musical sources to recover subaltern roles in the formation of Moroccan subjectivities in the late protectorate and early independence periods, the Bowles Moroccan Music archive has received scant attention. This may be due to the stature of Bowles himself, whose bohemian celebrity has precluded attempts to honestly reckon with the racism which underpinned his exploitative relationship with Morocco and Moroccans. This paper analyzes how conflicting discourses politicized Berber heritage and identity, incorporating Bowles’s Moroccan Music archive into the ongoing project to recover the voices of indigenous people in the modern history of Morocco.