By the 1930s, Egypt was the unrivalled node of commodified music production in the Arab world. Musicians were attaining previously unthinkable celebrity amongst mass listening publics with the growing circulation of commodified recorded sound and the hunger of mass readerships for printed materials on music and, more so, on the lives and opinions of musicians. Using interwar texts published in Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Tunisia that circulated much further afield, I examine early twentieth century printed commentary on Arabic music, its history and its celebrities to trace the ways in which such materials effected the re-signification of both music and musicians as bearers of socio-political meaning. To invoke music was increasingly to evoke a positionality in relation to collective aspirations, yearnings that were inseparable from the complex of national consciousness and its narratives. This cultural commodity fetishism, I argue, created incentives and opportunities for local and foreign state powers to position themselves as caretakers of the nation through public performance of public roles as caretakers of the nation’s music. The increasing centrality and growth of literate urban middle classes to state power and legitimacy meant that such performance had to compete for the favor of an ever-expanding mass public, thus deepening the state’s dependence on mass communications infrastructure to compete in the new arena of mass cultural politics. The paper then turns to the development of Arabic-language radio broadcast services as an instrument of state power. I trace the political instrumentalization of Arabic music and musical celebrity in the first years of Egyptian State Broadcasting and the BBC Arabic Service through an examination of the Marconi Company archives, the British Broadcasting Corporation written archives, and the British Foreign, Colonial and India Offices records. Building on recent work by Arturo Marzano, Rebecca Scales and Andrea Stanton on other Arabic-language radio broadcast services, I show how both British and Egyptian state bodies assembled ‘native’ and orientalist knowledge, massive infrastructural outlays and know-how, inventive systems of collecting audience feedback, and musical celebrities ‘in the flesh’ to channel the mass yearnings of Arabic listeners in the service of projects for regional and global hegemony.