The formation of the Turkish Republic required the shaping of Turkish citizen subjects. While many studies have traced Ataturk's project and the application of philosophical writings of Ziya Gokalp and other intellectuals for state-mandated cultural reforms, the impact of commercial recordings as a continued privately-owned public sphere has yet to be investigated for its continued links to the Ottoman period on the one hand, and its contrarian position to state media on the other. The early establishment of recording subsidiaries in Ottoman Turkey led to a strong recording industry that functioned as a sonic public sphere that sounded in tension with state controlled broadcast media until 1994. While state ensembles shaped Turkish classical and regional music, recording studios continued a variety of musical genres and styles developed during the previous Ottoman period, with the first recordings pressed in 1903. How does one evaluate the contrasting images of Turkish society in which diverse communities were represented in commercial recordings, while the state radio shaped a singular view of Turkish national identity through musici This essay examines how ethnically-marked genres were used in commercial recordings as negative portrayals to shore up normative Turkish ideals of male and female gender roles. Drawing from journal articles and literature from the 1920s-1940s, sonic portrayals in commercial recordings of monologues, kantos, and karagoz segments, as well as visual information from advertising and record catalogues, this study focuses on the tension between state discourses on the one hand and alternative public sphere commercial discourses on the other in order to examine how these discourses converged to shape male and female citizen-subjects. Based on the evidence of these sources, I claim that normative ideals of the new Turkish "male" and "female" were in large part encoded through stereotypical portrayal of ethnically-marked "male" and "female", thus providing a repertoire of stylized characteristics to guide every-day behavior.