In March 1919, Egypt erupted in revolution when the British arrested and exiled the Egyptian nationalist leader Sa’d Zaghlul. Thousands of Egyptians took to the streets spontaneously, protesting the exile of Zaghlul, demanding an end to British occupation, and calling for Egypt to assume its rightful place amongst modern nation-states in world affairs. In his account of the 1919 revolution, Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi’i described the urban demonstrations as led by students, later joined by groups of women and workers, and spreading to other parts of the country. Depictions of the revolution are found in Najib Mahfouz’s acclaimed novel, Palace Walk, which develops its climatic point around the young law student, Fahmi ‘Abd al-Jawad, being struck down by British bullets while leading a demonstration against British rule in 1919. Recently, scholarship on British colonization and the period of Egypt’s “liberal experiment” have emphasized the gendered endeavors of nationalists and colonists in their discourses on power and modernity. These studies have deepened our understanding of the development of the national subject, specifically the modern bourgeois man, woman, and family. Egyptian youth (al shabab) by the revolution of 1919 had developed into a dynamic force in the struggle against British colonization and a potent political and social symbol. Wilson Jacob’s recent study described the formation of an ambivalent, performative subjectivity in Egypt during this era known as “effendi masculinity” generated to guide young men towards a modern adulthood with national implications. This paper continues the study of gendered discourses of nationalism and modernity by focusing on the expression of youth masculinity within the Egyptian recording industry and the vaudeville music theater in 1919. Nationalistic songs sung in the streets during the revolution were taken directly from Egypt’s vaudevillian mass culture, from which writers and musicians were mining the streets for authentic material. Thus, I analyze the plays of Naguib al-Rhani and Ali al-Kassar from this period to evaluate how youth masculinity was infused with, strengthened by, and reflected in the growing sense of national identity and revolutionary spirit in these plays. My use of these sources is undergirded by Ziad Fahmy’s recent conclusions on the importance of colloquial Egyptian media in studying the development of Egyptian modern identity. This approach will provide a fuller understanding of the extent to which Egyptians across the socio-economic spectrum contributed to the discourses on and practices of colonial modernity and subject formation.