Ken Tucker
Ken Tucker reviews rock, country, hip-hop and pop music for Fresh Air. He is a cultural critic who has been the editor-at-large at Entertainment Weekly, and a film critic for New York Magazine. His work has won two National Magazine Awards and two ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards. He has written book reviews for The New York Times Book Review and other publications.
Tucker is the author of Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things to Love and Hate About Television.
-
From 18-year-old Olivia Rodrigo to 83-year-old Peter Stampfel, critic Ken Tucker says the music he most enjoyed in 2021 was recorded by artists who were either very young or quite old. -
Of the three Bee Gees, only Barry Gibb is still alive. His new album is Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook Volume 1. The HBO documentary, The Bee Gees, tells the story of the group's rise.
-
Burns is known for finding fresh takes on big topics, but his new eight-part PBS series about country music treads a well-worn path, leaning heavily on the biggest stars and the most obvious ideas.
-
Find everything our critics loved this year, all in one place: Maureen Corrigan's book list, movie pairings from Justin Chang, music recommended by Ken Tucker and David Bianculli's must-see TV list. -
No one's voice has ever soared like this. -
Jason Isbell's Southeastern, Kanye West's Yeezus and an assortment of remarkable women dominated the Fresh Air critic's year in listening. -
Schneider's Burden of Proof is a frequently beautiful, often morose, downcast album. You get the sense that, when he sings about not connecting with someone he loves, he's also singing about not connecting with a bigger audience. -
Listen and look past his roué image, and the chart-topper is revealed as an earnest nostalgist. -
The rapper's new album is his first collection since becoming a father with singer Beyonce. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the album is an uneven but intriguing collection of songs that tries to navigate a path between parenthood and an obsession with commercial success.
-
The singer-songwriter has said, as he was writing his new album Still Fighting the War, that "a theme of perseverance through hard times revealed itself." Rock critic Ken Tucker says the record is no downer, and that Cleaves finds complex sentiments and wittily phrased ideas in many of his new songs.
