Many Lebanese musicians making alternative music have faced allegations of being either too Lebanese, or not Lebanese enough. These musicians often bear the burden of representation— speaking for Lebanon, from some sort of “genuinely Lebanese” subject position. This question of cultural positioning is implicated in the politics of claiming a national history for Lebanon. In the absence of officially endorsed narratives of Lebanon’s past since 1975, the time before the onset of the 1975-1990 civil wars has been constructed as a lost “golden age” of economic growth, cultural cosmopolitanism, and religious plurality. Lebanon’s present, often characterized by a “golden age” nostalgia borne of post-war amnesiac trauma, is construed as precarious and perpetually on the verge of renewed violence. Lebanese art critics and theorists such as Chad Elias (2015) and Walid Sadek (2011) have framed studies of art and artists in Lebanon since the 1990s as engaging these “dominant chronopolitics” (Elias, 2015). Sadek argues that the instability of Lebanon’s present is caused in large part by the forcible severing—through dominant political rhetoric and academic framing—of Lebanese history from real life experience in the present (2011). The work of the artist, Sadek claims, is to search for a “habitable chronotope,” a way of framing Lebanese spatio-temporalities that is commensurate with lived experience. In Sadek’s formulation, a “habitable chronotope” promises to challenge the hegemony of conceptions of temporality that continue to exert force over ways of being in and experiencing Lebanon’s present. In this paper, I examine the work of artists whose music sonically indexes Lebanese cultural pasts. Looking specifically at the music of alternative musicians Zeid Hamdan, Mashrou’ Leila, and Waynick, and drawing from interviews with the artists and various key promoters and organizer’s in Beirut’s alternative music world, I argue that references to, and indexing of authorized musical practices such as Arabic music and fulklur mediates understandings of the trajectory of Lebanon’s history and politics and in so doing begins to imagine and evoke a habitable chronotope for Lebanon. By re-mediating referents from various musical pasts, I argue, musicians draw historical, sonic, and cultural through lines that bridge Lebanon’s past and its present, in order to construct or imagine a future in which the sounds, practices, and values of the past—thought to have been lost to the political and cultural violence of the civil wars and the subsequent decades of officially endorsed amnesia—maybe be relevant and accessible.