What may a seemingly obsolete technology teach us about a now omnipotent one? How may the social life of audiocassettes shed new light on the Internet and its impact? And in what ways may the stories told by everyday technologies enhance our understanding of the modern Middle East? Scholars have spilt no shortage of ink on social media and its significance in relation to the mass uprisings that shook the Middle East nearly a decade ago. Indeed, a quick survey of recent publications reveals that Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms have supplanted al-Jazeera as the subject of choice for many studies on the region’s media. Although offering key insights into the intersections of activism, authoritarianism, and contemporary politics, these works unanimously lend the impression that only the most recent media matter in Middle East studies. In the spirit of expanding this scholarship, I will place the Internet into conversation with a second technology that decentralized state-controlled Egyptian media, challenged local gatekeepers, and enabled an unprecedented number of people to participate in the creation of culture and the circulation of information decades earlier. To make sense of these long forgotten developments, I will focus on a single artist, a blind singer by the name of Shaykh Imam whose informal cassette recordings unsettle Egypt’s historical record. I will pay particular attention to the writing and re-writing of one historic event: Richard Nixon’s visit to Cairo in the summer of 1974. I will begin by unpacking this “sonorous spectacle,” before exploring how one contemporary song, Nixon Baba, countered the Egyptian government’s “official story” of the occasion. After elucidating Imam’s historical trajectory and the centrality of audiocassettes to his career, I will chart the movement and lasting resonance of Nixon Baba, which witnessed a resurgence during the “Arab Spring.” In so doing, I will consider what media histories may offer to Middle East studies and will demonstrate how the most ordinary things may yield the most surprising insights.