At the beginning of 1989, a remarkable thing happened across households in parts of eastern Europe. Small satellite dishes started to be connected to televisions in the lifeless living quarters of ordinary people. The people tuned in and turned on: they found themselves part of a brash new world bursting with shoulder pads, lip gloss and slap-bass riffs.

Their toes tapped, their torsos swayed, and they wondered what it would be like to be part of this world. A few months later, they would know. And that’s how MTV, a humble television channel that had papered the western world with a relentless barrage of slender melodies and primitive beats, played a key role in the fall of communism.

So the story goes, anyhow. The first to debunk it is Bill Roedy, current chairman and chief executive of MTV Networks International, whose favourite phrase is, “We don’t like to take ourselves too seriously.” But Roedy relishes telling the tale anyhow: how he happened to be in East Berlin during the startling events of 20 years ago, talking to politicians about opening the channel to the East German people. “We were preparing for a reception at the Politburo on the Tuesday. By the time we got there, there was no one around. They had all resigned. Forty-eight hours later, the wall came down.”

Visit the company’s UK headquarters in Oxford Street, and a giant picture in reception tells the story even more succinctly: a couple of East German guards are squatting on top of the wall on the night of November 9. They smile uncertainly, as they twirl their cherished symbol of a new life: an MTV umbrella. The picture is also prominent in Roedy’s office, alongside a fragment of the wall itself, and the company’s fortuitous slogan: “Breaking Down Barriers”.

This is all such heaven-sent PR that Roedy’s primary impulse is constantly to underplay it. “It is not something to be dwelt on. We don’t like to take ourselves too seriously.” He acknowledges that the channel did have a role to play, “although to be honest with you, it was not so much the music, it was more about the commercials”.

But there is no getting away from the delicious irony. During the course of the cold war, the US had bent over backwards to think of ways of culturally promoting its commitment to freedom, so that the people of eastern Europe would be persuaded and rise as one against their oppressors. The CIA famously sponsored abstract expressionism, hoping against hope that all those deep purple blots and scatty drips would send a resounding message across the globe.

Guess what: what it really needed to do was shake some ass. Who could resist those number ones of the time that beamed clamorously and illegitimately across the border: Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”; The Bangles’ “Eternal Flame”; Soul II Soul’s magnificent “Back to Life”? Pop music had become the beacon of desirable modernity. A succession of US governments never really got it; MTV did, and how.

On Thursday, the channel held its awards ceremony in Berlin as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the fall of the wall. U2 headlined with a free concert at the Brandenburg Gate, and while talking about it, Roedy waxes nostalgic again: “They were in Berlin at the time too. I don’t know how public this is, but there had been conflict within the band, they weren’t sure whether they wanted to stay together. So they went to a divided city to bring them back together again. That’s what artists do.”

When the wall came down, all the other walls came down too. It is no exaggeration to talk of an MTV empire today: Thursday’s awards were broadcast to more than 500m households across the world. Roedy has spent much of the past 20 years talking to a succession of governments that one would not naturally place in the ass-shaking camp – China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan – but they have all succumbed to his charms. MTV is now seen everywhere.

By stressing its “localisation” culture, which respects sensitivities and promises to promote indigenous music, the channel seems to have made friends in every part of the globe. “China was tough,” admits Roedy. “We were told not to mention the three Ts – Tibet, Tiananmen and Taiwan – but we managed to do all of them. We apologise a lot.”

The launch of MTV Arabia three years ago was another milestone. Roedy enthuses about the local hip-hop, “musically exactly like Anglo-American stuff but lyrically so different – one song is about how much [the rapper] loves his mother, another is about the pressures of getting married”. The channel transmits the call to prayer live, and engages young people in Ramadan.

It is Roedy’s background that sheds an interesting light on his company’s conquest of the world: a West Point graduate, he served for seven years in the US army, where he received the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry (with Silver Star). He has also commanded three Nato nuclear missile bases in Italy.

When he talks of the company’s strategy (“our mantra is aggressive, creative, relentless”) he sounds not unlike a general planning a military campaign. When he describes the company’s values (“freedom, diversity, tolerance, inclusion”) he may as well be describing a T-shirt design for the latest Crosby, Stills and Nash reunion tour. Pop music is caught somewhere between these apparent contradictions. It still speaks the language of love but is more than well acquainted with the sharper rhetoric of profit. How could those poor totalitarian regimes have resisted?

I ask Roedy if he still loves the music and he replies that he even watches The X Factor. I tell him it makes me feel depressed: I used to take pop music seriously, and hate to see it trivialised it that way. “That’s because you are a purist. And the world needs purists.” The fact remains, it was Jason Donovan who helped bring down the wall, not Bob Dylan. Mark it down as the triumph of not taking yourself too seriously.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden
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