This paper will explore the ways in which different socio-cultural environments in Egypt consumed poetry by the Egyptian dissident Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and his musician Shaikh Imam 'Isa in the 1970s. The duo’s irreverent satires are often thought to have appealed to a popular, ‘folk’ audience due to their use of the Egyptian vernacular and their oral transmission through song. Drawing on interviews and press reports from the period, as well as a number of recently published memoirs, however, this paper will argue that Nigm and Imam’s popularity among the lower classes was difficult to determine in the 1970s and cannot be inferred simply from looking at linguistic register or imagery. Circumstantial evidence, in fact, suggests that subaltern listeners perceived the duo’s didacticism as elitist despite the emancipatory charge of their ballads. On the other hand, Nigm and Imam’s songs won sanction from gatekeepers of the cultural establishment and helped mobilise the urban, left-wing middle-class student movement. To understand their popularity, thus requires examining how their art operated in different milieus and interacted with various media. State-controlled audio-visual and print media briefly promoted the duo. De-centralized media controlled by consumers, such as hand-written copies of the poems and audio-recordings of their songs, disseminated Nigm and Imam’s output once they lost access to the mass media. This paper contends that a notion of ‘folklore’ is relevant to this discussion primarily insofar as the middle-class student movement and the intelligentsia interpreted Nigm’s poetry in line with a nationalist imaginary that required reassuringly romanticized representations of an ‘authentic folk culture’ following Egypt’s military defeat in 1967. The fact that Imam’s songs paid stylistic homage to a largely defunct corpus of pre-1919 Tarab music meant that, in this context, his œuvre was valorised as culturally ‘authentic’ rather than simply ‘anachronistic’. Thus, notions of ‘folklore’ matter to a discussion of Nigm’s poetry not as a description of some ‘objective reality’ but because of the ways in which a historically situated discourse acquires meaning in specific socio-cultural settings. Any attempt to unravel Nigm and Imam’s popularity in the 1970s, therefore, must move from a literary study of ‘text’ to one that examines how the poetry was received in particular socio-cultural environments.