Kurt Loder (born May 5, 1945)[1] is an American entertainment critic, author, columnist, and television personality.

[4] Loder was born in Miami, Florida, and lived in Peru before his family settled in Ocean City, New Jersey.

"[7] He returned home to New Jersey at the end of 1972 and worked with a local newspaper and then an Ocean City-based magazine run 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.

[3] 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.

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.

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."

[9] Loder authored a 1990 collection of his Rolling Stone work called Bat Chain Puller.

[8] Loder has guest-starred as himself on Kenan & Kel, the "That '90s Show" episode of The Simpsons, Girlfriends, Duckman, Saturday Night Live, and Portlandia.

In 2016, Loder began hosting the music-based radio talk show True Stories on SiriusXM.

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.

[2]In a 1989 live show, Loder saw Skid Row front man Sebastian Bach wearing a T-shirt reading the anti-gay slogan "AIDS Kills Fags Dead."

Loder reacted with an article in which he stated, "In the land of homophobia, if Axl Rose owns the restaurant and Public Enemy are the diners, we have a new busboy."

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 later issued several public apologies.

"[13] 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.

[7] 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.