"So you shouldn't really flatter yourself that they want to be your buddy. They don't. Generally. They want you for some reason or other, and you just have to fend that off all the time." -- Kurt Loder
Kurt Loder (born May 5, 1945) is an American film critic, author, columnist, and television personality. He served in the 1980s as editor at Rolling Stone, during a tenure that Reason later called "legendary". He has contributed to articles in Esquire, Details, New York, and Time. He has also made cameos on several films and television series. Prior to Rolling Stone, Loder had worked for Circus magazine and had been drafted into the United States Army. He is currently best known for his role at MTV News and for appearing in numerous other MTV-related television specials.
"And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.""And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.""And that's very important, too, 'cause a lot of people just assume everyone's a Democrat, or everyone's a Republican or whatever, and they're not. And that's a really important thing to adhere to.""And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.""And you can't really cover people critically that you're friends with.""But music raises a lot of issues. Music is something that matters to people a lot, and they put a lot of passion into it. And I think when you have an area like that, you're gonna find a lot of issues coming up.""I came over here and worked for rock magazines, and I worked for Rolling Stone, which has a very high standard of journalism, a very good research department.""I don't find music being less important than, like, politics.""I know what the structure of the language is.""I spent time in, like, criminal courts, and covering murder trials for papers.""I think television often has dismissed younger people. They figure, well, they're not really watching news, that's not our audience.""I was in college for two years, and just hated it in the '60s.""I worked for a newspaper in Europe for, I lived in Europe for about seven years, so I worked in this sort of a yellow journalism kind of a thing, it was like a scandal sheet.""If you ask questions that interest you, you'll get answers that interest your audience.""If your audience is young, it'd be youth culture, if your audience is older, it'd be older people, if it were senior citizens, it'd be senior citizen issues. So you try and hit the target audience.""It's gonna be short if it's news; put it at the top. Style's not an issue, just make it news.""It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them.""Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.""So no one should rely on television either for their knowledge of music or for news. There's just more going on. It's an adjunct to the written word, which I think is still the most important thing.""So, yeah, I think it had a major effect. I think in franchising younger people, it was just an idea that's never been trotted out before, but it makes perfectly good sense.""Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment.""Television's not going read stories to you.""Television's very dependent on images. That's not what news is.""Unless you're doing a feature piece, which is going to be longer, and you have more time to get into stuff.""Well, a lead is the most important thing about the story.""Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.""Well, news is anything that's interesting, that relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience.""Whomever you're going to interview, you have to be interested in what it is you want to know from them. You have to be interested in the subject.""You find the most important thing that really grabs you, and put it right up top. Don't bury the lead. Put it at the top. Best thing to do. Never go wrong that way. It's an immutable law of journalism. It just always works."
Loder was born in Ocean City, New Jersey. He graduated in 1963 from Ocean City High School in Ocean City. He spent two years in college "and just hated it". He was drafted into the United States Army and joined its journalism school. He later said that he "just fell into" his field, elaborating that his "entire journalism background is four weeks... That's it. Nothing else. You can learn journalism in four weeks. It's not an overcomplicated thing. It's very, very simple." He was in the military for three years.
Loder lived all over Europe for the next several years, doing what he later called "scandal sheet" "yellow journalism". He returned home to New Jersey at the end of 1972 and worked with a local newspaper and then an Ocean City based magazine by the sister of the city's famous writer Gay Talese. He left in the summer of 1976 to work with a free Long Island rock weekly called Good Times. He received only about $200 a week. After meeting a fellow "music geek", David Fricke,
"the two of us began driving into Manhattan virtually every night to wallow in the flourishing punk rock scene at CBGB's, Max's, etc. This was, fortunately, cool with the wives. I mean, we'd still be sitting upright at four in the morning through fist fights, mass nod-outs, and sets by bands with names like Blinding Headache, played to audiences of three people, of which we'd be two-thirds. I don't think I can quite convey how great days those were.
They both joined Circus in 1978 and moved to Manhattan. Loder went on to become one of its official editors. The staff had a fun, relaxed atmosphere and considered the magazine to be second or third tier. Loder later said that "Whatever was said to be 'happening' in commercial pop music was... on the cover of Circus. Disco? Run with it. Shirtless teen popsters? Put 'em on the cover... a, shall we say, ardent enthusiasm for pix of nubile youths. Metal, of course, was really the mag's meat." He also remarked that "it was a foregone conclusion that writing of any technical ambition, about new acts of any real excitement or interest, would make it in the mag only by the sheerest accident." Loder briefly experimented with inhalant based drugs at Circus; he stopped after experiencing a "gushing" nosebleed without any feeling left in his face.
Loder started his nine-year run at Rolling Stone in May 1979. RockCritics.com has called him "one of Rolling Stone's most talented and prolific feature writers". Reason has called his tenure "legendary". While at Rolling Stone, Loder co-authored singer Tina Turner's 1986 autobiography I, Tina. He then contributed to the screenplay adaption for the film What's Love Got to Do with It.
Loder joined MTV in 1987 as the host of their flagship music news program, The Week in Rock. It was later expanded and renamed to MTV News in which he was an anchor and correspondent. Loder was one of the first to break the news of Kurt Cobain's death; he interrupted regular programming to inform viewers that Cobain was found dead. Loder authored a 1990 collection of his Rolling Stone work called Bat Chain Puller.
Kurt has guest-starred as himself on Kenan & Kel, an episode of The Simpsons, Girlfriends, Duckman, and Saturday Night Live. He has also appeared in the films Who's the Man?, The Paper, Fear of a Black Hat, Airheads, Dead Man on Campus, Belly, The Suburbans, Entropy, Blair Witch 2, Sugar & Spice, Pauly Shore Is Dead, Resurrection, and Ramones Raw. Loder currently resides in New York City.
In a 1989 show, Loder saw Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach wearing a T-Shirt reading the anti-homosexual slogan "AIDS Kills Fags Dead." Loder wrote an article saying that "In the land of homophobia, if Axl Rose owns the restaurant and Public Enemy are the diners, we have a new bus boy." Bach considered Loder's words "complete bullshit", saying that he had only used the shirt to dry himself off and strongly opposes the message on it, and he later issued several public apologies.
Loder is a libertarian. He summarizes his position as “Free Love and Free Markets”. He has called New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg "a scary guy" and called it "amazing that people don’t rise up with pitchforks." Loder opposed President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election and he believes that MTV News played a small role in Bush's loss. Loder believes that his views came from his childhood experiences, saying:
I grew up on the Jersey Shore, on a little barrier island. The Atlantic Ocean was on one side, the bay was on the other. Everyone there hunted and fished and clammed and got crabs out of the bay. And one day my brother told me someone had come down from the Bureau of Petty Harassment or something and they measured the temperature of the water and had decided it was a little too warm and a certain type of bacteria might incubate in it and there was a chance that might harm the clams. And so, from now on, no one was supposed to take clams out of the bay anymore. Which everyone ignored. And no one died. That was before the government got tenacious about this stuff. So I thought that was pretty stupid right there.
Loder was highly critical of Michael Moore's documentary Sicko, saying it was "heavily doctored." He argued, “When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment.”
Media
Loder defines news as "anything that's interesting". He's critical of the idea of new journalism and argues that it has been used as a rhetorical shield for lazy journalism. He believes that new technology has fragmented American culture to the extent that no cinematic or musical success can unify it, as with past rock bands such as The Beatles. He also strongly supports copyright laws. He generally considers himself to be supportive of new media despite his role at MTV, once joking that "MTV is part of Viacom, which controls Paramount, and so on and so forth. It’s the evil empire".
Loder's philosophy on the people he reports on is that:
"You shouldn't make friends. It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them. So you shouldn't really flatter yourself that they want to be your buddy. They don't... They want you for some reason or other, and you just have to fend that off all the time. And you can't really cover people critically that you're friends with. How would that work? That would be bad. So you always have to keep that in mind".
