Legendary MTV VJ Kurt Loder Celebrated on His 75th Birthday by Nostalgic MTV Fans

Former MTV News journalist Kurt Loder turned 75 this week, and fans who remember watching him on the network back in the day are feeling nostalgic for how MTV used to be in the ’80s and ’90s. Of course, MTV was a much more music-focused network at the time, as these were the days before Jersey Shore and Teen Mom were popular. At the time, Loder was synonymous with MTV, as you could hardly ever tune into the network at any given time without soon seeing his face. Now, nearly halfway through 2020, Loder has reached his 75th birthday, leaving those who remember watching Loder on MTV feeling a lot older by seeing him now.

This chatter over Loder’s birthday has gotten the former MTV star’s name trending on Twitter, and while the occasion is making some of his fans feel like they’re aging rather quickly, others are taking the opportunity to celebrate Loder’s time on television, especially his time spent on MTV News. The consensus from fans seems to be that while Loder was employed by a “hip” television station, he never hammed up the way he delivered the news on MTV, always maintaining the utmost professionalism and staying true to who he is. And these qualities only made MTV viewers appreciate him all the more, even if he didn’t quite have the pizzazz of many of the music stars often seen on the same channel.

“Kurt Loder was never trying to be down. He was clearly a professional and we respected him for it. When he said it, we believed it because we knew he knew his sh-t,” one fan writes on Twitter. Another fan refers to Loder as a “sweet man with a killer deadpan,” also praising Loder’s continued work as a film and television critic. Feeling nostalgic, another Loder fan is reminded by his birthday of how things used to be on MTV when Loder was still present on the network. “So MTV in honor of Kurt Loder’s 75th bday, can you return [your] programming back to the way it was when it was cool? When you actually showed music videos? Just for his sake?” she writes in her tweet.

Loder first began working as a correspondent for MTV in 1987 when he began hosting the network’s official news program, The Week in Rock. Later, the show would be renamed to the more simple title of MTV News, the intro of which is nearly as iconic as the reports delivered by Loder on the show. This role on MTV made Loder a very recognizable television star of the era, as for many, he would be the very first person to announce some of the biggest news stories of those years. In particular, Loder was one of the first news correspondents to break the story of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s shocking death, interrupting the network’s regularly-scheduled programming to deliver the news.

These days, you can find Loder hosting the music talk show True Stories on SiriusXM. Still, those of us who were around in the ’90s and had MTV on the television a time or two will always remember him as the voice of the network during that era. Hopefully this outpouring of support from fans online have made Loder’s 75th birthday his best one yet, and here’s to many more. From Twitter, you can take a look at some of the tweets in support of Loder below.

Topics: MTV News, Obituaries