In 1926, Tunisian-Jewish singer Habiba Messika stepped into the Baidaphon Records studio in Berlin to record “Baladī yā Baladī” (“My Country, Oh My Country”)—an anti-colonial nationalist song that, once pressed and distributed as shellac 78-rpm discs, energized Arab audiences and aggravated European powers. “Baladī yā Baladī” would have been familiar to Arab listeners aware of the nahda, or the Arabic awakening of modern literature, politics, and art that instituted change in establishing a new modernity in the Middle East/North African (MENA) region. In the third verse, however, Habiba Messika added to the original Egyptian-dialect lyrics by calling out “Baladī Tunisī” (“My Tunisian country”), alluding to her own nationalist sentiments with her home country that had been under French colonial rule since 1881. From the comfort of the Baidaphon studio in Berlin, rather than the French Protectorate of Tunisia, Habiba Messika had more agency and safety to speak out against colonialism. Moreover, the recording is a testament to Baidaphon’s transnational enterprise between their European studio and a worldwide audience and their mission as the first Arab-owned company to center the voices of MENA musicians. In this paper, I argue that the portability and growing omnipresence of records and phonographs in the Middle East spread Habiba Messika’s anti-colonialist message in “Baladī yā Baladī.” As Racy (2003) and Fahmy (2011) demonstrate, records, the phonograph, and record companies were part of a larger nexus of media that bridged the gap between elite intellectualism and mass consumption. The portability and accessibility of these technologies provided an avenue of political, social, and cultural ideologies to spread through a transnational network of MENA listeners. Through producing politically driven songs, Baidaphon and Habiba Messika intervened into the recording music industry to establish not just a modern Arabic musical style, but also a collective Arab identity.