MTV is shutting down its European music video channels, which were once symbols of freedom for many young people in the Balkans and the former Eastern Bloc. Lida Hujic had a front-row seat when the channel was at its peak.
As a fashion-conscious young woman, just turned 20, I was completely fascinated by MTV from the moment I set eyes on it. This was circa 1990, when an illegally-erected satellite dish on the roof of the building where I lived in Sarajevo brought MTV into my life. Little did I know that MTV would literally change my life in return.
Between the late 1980s and mid 1990s MTV was a game-changer for many urban Eastern Europeans of my generation. But for me, the stars were aligned for something extra-special.
In this period of major political change throughout Eastern Europe, MTV became the first immediate access to the ‘West’. This unifying, aspirational concept represented the antithesis of the stultifying communist regime, while also overcoming cultural differences.
In synch with our Western counterparts, we could watch videos for Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ and George Michael’s ‘Freedom 90’ when they were first released. But what happened to me became the stuff of urban folklore in former Yugoslavia, when I got involved with one of the boys from MTV, VJ Paul King.
This connection granted me a rare and intimate behind-the-scenes experience of MTV as a cultural phenomenon during this historically significant time. I accompanied Paul to various cities around Eastern Europe when he was invited to make personal appearances.
These events provided audiences around the region with first-hand experience of Western pop. I’m aware that there was a huge gap between the privileged minorities that we were part of and the majority, for whom Western commercial artefacts were out of reach. Still, it is fair to say that for urban youths who were into cool stuff, MTV provided cultural currency.
MTV mania
The station’s appeal could be seen when Paul and I went to the Polish city of Gdansk for the 1991 edition of the Sopot Music Festival. The festival boasted many Western acts, but ‘MTV mania’ was beyond the expectations of either the organisers or Paul himself. When we arrived at the venue for rehearsal in a limousine, a crowd of young people hanging outside thronged around it. The vehicle began to shake under the pressure of young screaming fans.
This incident caused some anxiety among the organisers, who were unprepared for this kind of attention. It was anticipated that the teenybop duo Bros would get into such ‘trouble’ and, for this reason, they had four body-guards. But instead the fans mobbed the MTV face, Paul.
During rehearsal, when Paul simply walked onto the stage just to inspect it, there was a spontaneous applause from observers. At an exhibition opening by a famous Polish painter scheduled during the music festival, the painter chose Paul as his special guest, offering him any painting of his choice.
The handing over of the painting with a signed dedication was filmed by a Polish television crew. The allure of MTV got surreal when we had a car crash (nothing too serious but certainly unpleasant). Once the guy who drove into our car realised whom he had hit, he asked Paul for an autograph!
A brief encounter with Putin
In Russia, everything was more politicised. Over there, MTV became one of the first available sources of popular culture without communist censorship at a time when a ‘screen revolution’ was taking place.
In March 1991, MTV announced that it was going to be the first non-Soviet channel to be broadcast 24 hours-a-day in Russia on Leningrad’s Cable TV Network. The decision to carry MTV there followed a trial period during 1990 when MTV made its debut throughout the greater Soviet Union in an abbreviated format with a one-hour weekly show taken from two MTV programmes. The MTV hour was presented as part of a popular youth-oriented show, ‘Vzgyad’ (‘Outlook’).
Advocates of reform such as Anatoly Sobchak – the first democratically elected mayor of Leningrad (which reverted to its original name of St. Petersburg following a referendum in 1991 to reject the Soviet connotation) became national heroes. When MTV made its debut on the local television screens, it was appropriated by this revolutionary cause.
City leaders in St. Petersburg compared the launch of MTV to the days when Peter the Great opened Russia to Western influences. The channel was praised as a way for Russians to learn about Western culture, while the use of English on the channel functioned as a kind of guarantee of ‘non-Russo-Soviet’ authenticity.
Music from the West was closely associated with a powerful expression of dissent in Eastern Europe. It therefore made perfect sense for St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, in his role as the patron of the music festival ‘White Nights of St Petersburg’ in June 1992 to have wanted to be seen with an MTV VJ, in order to enhance his image as the hero of reform.
Sobchak’s deputy and head of the city’s Committee for External Relations was one Vladimir Putin. Known as Sobchak’s protégé, this professional relationship is thought to have been pivotal in launching Putin’s political career. How I wish I could remember more of our exchange.
What I do remember is how uncomfortable it felt at one of the official receptions, with caviar and alcohol galore in a city that was completely bare of basic supplies. There were no shops, unless you were taken to a back alley. A car would stop on the street, open the boot, and a queue would form to get whatever food they could.
In the hotel where we, as Westerners, stayed, there were more young women escorts than guests, trying to earn a dollar by selling their youth out of desperation. In such an atmosphere, attending the next function, this time on a boat anchored somewhere off the coast of Russia towards Finland, did not feel right.
Instead, we hooked up with a burgeoning underground art scene. They, too, were into MTV, but for its cultural prestige. During the brief period when the old institutions of power had not yet been replaced by the new ones, it was possible to live in buildings previously emptied for renovation, but which had for a short time been forgotten by the authorities.
As we went up towards one of the squats, I remember being told that we were climbing the stairs that inspired a scene in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Another hangout was the mythical Fontaka 145, the birthplace of Russian rave culture.
Fiction and urban myth converged when we befriended a real-life princess. Katya Galitzine, daughter of Prince George Galitzine and direct descendant of Catherine the Great, had moved to St Petersburg from England to reconnect with her heritage.
Hyped-up in Hungary
Although it barely registered in Britain, VJ Paul King’s transfer from MTV to its new sister channel VH-1, which was aimed at an older viewership, was treated in Hungary as breaking news.
In Budapest in September 1994, what in Western Europe would have essentially been a non-event – the arrival of an MTV VJ for chewing-gum brand Trident’s first-anniversary party – turned into a full-blown media spectacle. Hungarian broadcasters covered the visit as a national event, with daily news bulletins tracking each appearance.
While marketed as a celebration of youth culture, access to the chewing-gum party was strikingly exclusive. Trident boasted of being ‘the number one youth chewing-gum’, but the main parties in attendance for the lush party in a castle were not ordinary teenagers. They were the ‘suits’: media and music figures, business elites and political insiders. A handful of well-connected young people managed brief contact. For the rest, MTV’s presence was largely mediated through television.
Our main hostess was Albert Györgyi, a cosmopolitan, English-speaking broadcaster who skilfully positioned herself as Hungary’s natural interpreter of Western media culture. With her pulse firmly on the side of progress, she choreographed every moment to echo MTV’s aesthetics and show that Hungary was keeping up: from greeting the VJ on the airport tarmac on arrival with a familiar kiss, to ensuring cameras caught her stepping from limousines, appearing effortless rather than deferential. She sadly passed away in 2008.
Last but not least, former punk-musician-turned-culture-minister Fodor Gábor hosted a press conference at a fashionable café widely seen as a Western enclave. This was a way of reinforcing his own narrative of youthful, globally minded leadership — a continuation of the rebellious spirit once expressed through subcultural music.
As for any forward-thinking politician of this era in Eastern Europe, MTV equalled progress. The whole experience in Budapest was far more spontaneous compared to dealing with Russian officials. Györgyi and Fodor were friends and it felt that we were their mates too.
Back to the Balkans
Between 1987 and 1997, MTV broadcast as a single pan-European channel before splitting the feed into localised versions. The first Eastern European local channel was MTV Poland in 2000, followed by MTV Romania in 2002. MTV Adria, set up to cover the former Yugoslav countries, was launched in September 2005. During the launch, the main party was in Ljubljana. The headline act, The Hives, who brought the global touch, did a gig there and then jetted off to Zagreb with a number of local acts also performing to show that ‘this was our MTV’.
“Our main goal was to localise MTV, both through music editorial and local show production,” remembers Marko Benda, who was appointed head of MTV Adria at the end of 2005. “However, Yugoslavia was long gone, and the new generation had developed very different habits, which made our operations more challenging.
“As we were privately owned, all investments had to be justified by revenue streams, which was quite difficult in the ex-YU market due to the rise of new digital platforms and traditional TV competitors. MTV, in its traditional form, was slowly losing ground and required significant change and adaptation to the digital era,” Benda told me. In the end, the investment was not sustainable for the owners, and they decided to sell the franchise to an international trading group, which took over MTV Adria in 2009.
Among the bands who played at the launch of MTV Adria was the Bosnian outfit, Dubioza Kolektiv, one of the most successful international bands to emerge from the Balkans. Dubioza received a lot of support from MTV Adria under Benda. They would go on to get a lot of airplay and even an MTV Video Music Award for ‘Best Adria’ act.
However, MTV meant the most when it was MTV Europe. Back then, a local musician could only dream of having their spot played on MTV, believing that if only they had that chance, it’d be a passport to global fame. The arrival of MTV Adria was a positive moment, but its gradual demise was also a sobering experience for alternative music lovers.
“MTV Adria meant something but only to musicians and people in the music industry, especially those into alternative music,” says Branko (Brano) Jakubovic, Dubioza’s co-founder. “I remember that viewing figures did not come close to the cheapest production of music channels playing ‘narodnjaci’ [local commercial folk], in spite of their poor production standards, bad lighting, playback and mimicking dance movements characteristic to that genre.”
It was a wake-up call for Brano.
“We understood then that a cultural revolution was not going to happen; that our desire to be on MTV was a pipe dream and that the Balkan mainstream would always be the same as it ever was,” he says. “By the time MTV arrived in our neck of the woods, technology was already moving into a new direction and we started to discover new ways of promotion.”
YouTube and social media were the channels that would lead the band to international success. By Brano’s own admission, it’s been over ten years since MTV had “any relevance at all” in the band’s life but he will fondly hold onto his award – “at least, it fills up the bookshelf”.
It’s the same for me. My last MTV encounter was at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2017 but that was only because they were held in London, where I live and I was invited. Like Brano, I still cherish my MTV Video Music Award – it was for ‘best academic achievement’, specially created for me when I was awarded a PhD for my thesis about MTV in 1999.
But although MTV’s owner Paramount will be pulling the plug on its once-beloved European music video channels on December 31, the memories and friendships formed while I was involved will stay with me forever.
Lida Hujic was a popular youth presenter at Radio Television Sarajevo in the late 1980s. She completed a PhD about MTV at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, then worked as an author, public speaker, university lecturer, curator and consultant.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.
Source: Balkan Insight
