If you got your music news from MTV in the late 80’s and early-mid 90’s, it was anchor Kurt Loder giving you the updates. He just turned 75 and now all of his former viewers are feeling really old.
Kurt Loder helped give MTV some serious music journalism cred when he joined the cable network in 1988 to host their new flagship show The Week in Rock and founded MTV News. He cut his chops with a storied nine year run at Rolling Stone, and would become the go-to guy for anything music news related on the cable network. As a result, many Gen-X’ers got all of their music news from Kurt’s mouth, as it was way before the dawn of the internet. Kurt turned 75-year-old on May 5, 2020, and it’s making his audience feel really old themselves now.
The shock of Kurt being the age of most Gen-X’ers parents caught many by surprise, and his name began trending on Twitter in appreciation of his talent. After all, he was the guy who broke into MTV programming to report on the Apr. 5, 1994 suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Now he’s halfway to eighty? He’s getting major props from the generation that he delivered music news to, and we’ve got five things to know about Kurt Loder.
1. Kurt began his journalism career in the U.S. Army.
Kurt graduated from Ocean City High School in 1963, and went on to spend two miserable years in college, which he said wasn’t for him. He was drafted during the late 1960’s and joined the Army’s journalism school. He returned to his native New Jersey in 1972 after spending much of his Army tenure in Europe.
2. Kurt was one of Rolling Stone‘s best feature and interview writers in the 1980’s. He joined the magazine in 1979, a year after becoming an editor at the music magazine Circus. During his tenure at the magazine, the writer/editor authored iconic interviews with Bruce Springsteen in 1984, Bob Dylan for the mag’s 20th anniversary issue in 1987 and more of his work can be found in the book Rolling Stone Interviews Of The Eighties. While at Rolling Stone, Kurt co-authored iconic singer Tina Turner‘s 1986 autobiography I, Tina.
3. Kurt gave legit credibility to MTV News when he started there in 1988. He was the face of MTV News, giving updates at the top of every hour on the network. He founded and anchored the network’s hourlong music news program The Week in Rock. Kurt also reported from the field, including VMA red carpets and major concerts. Kurt served as host of MTV News Presents, a weekly special programming showcase. He’ll forever be remembered by Gen-X for breaking into regular programming in 1994 to report that Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain had died as the result of a suicide.
