"I don't find music being less important than, like, politics"
About this Quote
Kurt Loder’s line lands with the casual shrug of someone who’s spent decades watching culture get patronized as “just entertainment” while it quietly does the job politics claims to do: organize attention, forge identities, and set the emotional weather. The phrasing is the tell. “I don’t find” makes it personal, almost offhand, but it’s also a refusal to accept the hierarchy that treats policy as serious and music as decorative. Then there’s that disarming “like,” the verbal side-eye that punctures the sanctimony around “politics” as the only arena where history happens.
Coming from a journalist who helped mainstream music coverage during MTV’s peak, the subtext is professional and ideological. Loder isn’t arguing that a song writes legislation; he’s saying the cultural arena is where people rehearse their values before they ever vote them. Music is a mass civic language: it can normalize dissent, glamorize nihilism, sell solidarity, or make rage feel righteous. If politics is power formalized, music is power felt. And felt power travels faster.
The context matters: Loder’s generation watched rock become both commodity and megaphone, from Vietnam-era protest to Reagan-era backlash to the culture wars where lyrics got hauled into hearings like contraband. His point isn’t that music replaces politics; it’s that politics has always depended on cultural narrative to be legible. Treat music as “less important,” and you miss the part where people actually learn what to want.
Coming from a journalist who helped mainstream music coverage during MTV’s peak, the subtext is professional and ideological. Loder isn’t arguing that a song writes legislation; he’s saying the cultural arena is where people rehearse their values before they ever vote them. Music is a mass civic language: it can normalize dissent, glamorize nihilism, sell solidarity, or make rage feel righteous. If politics is power formalized, music is power felt. And felt power travels faster.
The context matters: Loder’s generation watched rock become both commodity and megaphone, from Vietnam-era protest to Reagan-era backlash to the culture wars where lyrics got hauled into hearings like contraband. His point isn’t that music replaces politics; it’s that politics has always depended on cultural narrative to be legible. Treat music as “less important,” and you miss the part where people actually learn what to want.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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