Ken Tucker | |
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 Tucker in 2008 | |
| Born | Kenneth Tucker |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A., English, New York University |
| Occupation(s) | arts critic, magazine editor and nonfiction book author |
| Years active | since 1974 [1] |
| Website | www.kentucker.net |
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and nonfiction book author.
Tucker was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from New York University.
While attending NYU, he began writing freelance reviews for The Village Voice , SoHo Weekly News , and Rolling Stone . [2] From 1979 to 1983, Tucker was the rock critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner . From 1983 to 1990, he worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer , first as the newspaper's rock critic, and then its television critic.
In 1990, he joined Entertainment Weekly (a Time Inc. publication) as a founding staffer. He was the magazine's television critic, [3] DVD critic and an editor-at-large until 2013, [4] except for one year (2005–06) as film critic at New York Magazine .
Since 1982, Tucker has been a rock and pop music critic for the National Public Radio (NPR) talk show Fresh Air with Terry Gross . [2] [5]
Tucker has appeared many times on television, including multiple appearances on The Today Show , Good Morning America , The Charlie Rose Show , and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson . [6] He appears in the 1984 documentary The Gospel According to Al Green . [6] He is interviewed on-camera in Cartoon College , a documentary about the history of comics.
Tucker's reviews have provoked some notable responses from his subjects. In August 1980, Billy Joel, enraged by a negative review of his music Tucker had written in the L.A. Herald Examiner, tore up the review on stage during one of his concerts. [7]
Tucker's negative reviews of Seth MacFarlane’s animated series Family Guy resulted in a number of MacFarlane counter-criticisms, including a scene in which Stewie Griffin breaks the neck of an Entertainment Weekly writer widely assumed to be Tucker. [8]
For his critical writings, Tucker was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 1984, [9] the first rock critic to become a Pulitzer finalist. [10] He won a National Magazine Award in 1995 [11] and has twice won a Deems Taylor Award by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). [12] [13]
Tucker has written frequently about poetry and comic books, most notably for The New York Times Book Review [14] [15] and The Best American Poetry blog. [16] His 1985 New York Times review [17] of the serialized portions of Art Spiegelman’s then-work-in-progress Maus is considered a factor in the mainstream acceptance of graphic novels and the publication of Maus by Pantheon Books. [18]
He has contributed essays to the following anthologies:
Sleater-Kinney is an American rock band that formed in Olympia, Washington, in 1994. The band's lineup features Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, following the departure of longtime member Janet Weiss in 2019. Sleater-Kinney originated as part of the riot grrrl movement and has become a key part of the American indie rock scene. The band is also known for its feminist and progressive politics.
Marquee Moon is the debut album by American rock band Television. It was released on February 8, 1977, by Elektra Records. In the years leading up to the album, Television had become a prominent act on the New York music scene and generated interest from a number of record labels, eventually signing a record deal with Elektra. The group rehearsed extensively in preparation for Marquee Moon before recording it at A & R Recording in September 1976. It was produced by the band's frontman Tom Verlaine and sound engineer Andy Johns.
Corin Lisa Tucker is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist best known for her work with rock band Sleater-Kinney. Tucker is also a member of the alternative rock supergroup Filthy Friends, and previously recorded with the punk band Heavens to Betsy as well as The Corin Tucker Band.
Los Angeles is the debut studio album by American rock band X, released on April 26, 1980, by Slash Records. It was produced by ex-Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek and includes a cover of the 1967 Doors song "Soul Kitchen".
Alex Ross is an American music critic and author who specializes in classical music. Ross has been a staff member of The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His extensive writings include performance and record reviews, industry updates, cultural commentary, and historical narratives in the realm of classical music. He has written three well-received books: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007), Listen to This (2011), and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (2020).
Ty Burr is an American film critic, columnist, and author who currently writes a film and popular culture newsletter "Ty Burr's Watchlist" on Substack. Burr previously served as film critic at The Boston Globe from 2002 until 2021.
Wesley Morris is an American film critic and podcast host. He is currently critic-at-large for The New York Times, as well as co-host, with Jenna Wortham, of the New York Times podcast Still Processing. Previously, Morris wrote for The Boston Globe, then Grantland. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work with The Globe and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his New York Times coverage of race relations in the United States, making Morris the only writer to have won the Criticism prize more than once.
Edmund Ward was an American writer and radio commentator, the "rock-and-roll historian" for NPR's program Fresh Air from 1987 to 2017 and one of the original founders of Austin's South by Southwest music festival.
Stephen Holden is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic.
Jonathan Gold was an American food critic and music critic. He was for many years the chief food critic for the Los Angeles Times and also wrote for LA Weekly and Gourmet, in addition to serving as a regular contributor on KCRW's Good Food radio program. Gold often chose small, traditional immigrant restaurants for his reviews, although he covered all types of cuisine. In 2007, while writing for the LA Weekly, he became the first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
David Browne is an American journalist and author. He is currently a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributor since 2008. He was the resident music critic at Entertainment Weekly between 1990 and 2006. He was an editor at Music & Sound Output magazine and a music critic at the New York Daily News before EW. He has written articles for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Spin, The New Republic and Time, as well as stories for NPR.
David Hajdu is an American columnist, author and professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was the music critic for The New Republic for 12 years and is music editor at The Nation.
The second season of Family Guy first aired on the Fox network in 21 episodes from September 23, 1999, to August 1, 2000. The series follows the dysfunctional Griffin family—father Peter, mother Lois, daughter Meg, son Chris, baby Stewie and their anthropomorphic dog Brian, all of whom reside in their hometown of Quahog, a fictional town in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The show features the voices of series creator Seth MacFarlane, Alex Borstein, Seth Green, Lacey Chabert and later Mila Kunis in the roles of the Griffin family. The executive producers for the second production season were David Zuckerman and MacFarlane; the aired season also contained eight episodes which were holdovers from season one. During this season, Family Guy relocated from Sunday, with only one episode airing on a Sunday. The season aired its first two episodes on Thursdays, then aired mainly on Tuesdays between March and August 2000.
Gregory Stephen Tate was an American writer, musician, and producer. A long-time critic for The Village Voice, Tate focused particularly on African-American music and culture, helping to establish hip-hop as a genre worthy of music criticism. Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (1992) collected 40 of his works for the Voice and he published a sequel, Flyboy 2, in 2016. A musician himself, he was a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition and the leader of Burnt Sugar.
James Miller is an American writer and academic. He is known for writing about Michel Foucault, philosophy as a way of life, social movements, popular culture, intellectual history, eighteenth century to the present; radical social theory and history of political philosophy. He currently teaches at The New School.
Will Hermes is an American author, broadcaster, journalist and critic who has written extensively about popular music. He is a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone and to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His work has also appeared in Pitchfork, Spin, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Believer, GQ, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, Details, City Pages, The Windy City Times, and Option. He is the author of Love Goes To Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (2011), a history of the New York City music scene in the 1970s; and Lou Reed: The King of New York, a biography.
The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, frequently abridged as The Idler Wheel..., is the fourth studio album by Fiona Apple. Like her second album When the Pawn..., its title derives from a poem written by Apple herself. It was released in the UK on June 18, 2012 and in the US on June 19 by Epic Records. The album received a nomination at the 2013 Grammy Awards for Best Alternative Album. The album received widespread acclaim from critics, and was frequently included in year and decade-end lists by several publications; in 2020, Rolling Stone placed the album at number 213 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It was her highest debut in the US, reaching number 3 on the Billboard 200 with 72,000 copies sold in its first week.
Annalyn Swan is an American writer and biographer who has written extensively about the arts. With her husband, art critic Mark Stevens, she is the author of de Kooning: An American Master (2004), a biography of Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, which was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. De Kooning also won the National Book Critics Circle prize for biography and the Los Angeles Times biography award, and was named one of the 10 best books of 2005 by The New York Times. In her review in The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote: "The elusiveness of its subject makes the achievements of de Kooning: An American Master that much more dazzling."
Charles Aaron is an American music journalist and editor, formerly for Spin magazine, where he worked for 23 years.
David Breskin is an American writer, poet, and record producer. He has written nine books, including collaborations with the visual artists Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha. Beginning in the early 1980s, he produced albums by musicians including John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Ronald Shannon Jackson and Vernon Reid. In more recent years, he has worked with Nels Cline, Mary Halvorson, Kris Davis, Miles Okazaki, Dan Weiss, Ingrid Laubrock, and Craig Taborn, among others.
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