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.
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Surrounded on the charts by younger men and their big hits about drinking and partying, Sara Evans' hit-single success of Slow Me Down's title song all the more heartening.
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Daughter of Everything is a superb pop album with one foot in the past and another in the future.
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Jon Pardi and Jason Eady confront the pop current that keeps country music commercially viable while connecting to a past that fewer and fewer listeners are aware of.
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His 18th album is a mixed-bag assortment of covers and originals brimming with undimmed eagerness.
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Jason Isbell's Southeastern, Kanye West's Yeezus and an assortment of remarkable women dominated the Fresh Air critic's year in listening.
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The late Ellen Willis was the first pop-music critic for The New Yorker. A new anthology, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, collects her thoughts on Dylan, Joplin and The Rolling Stones, among others. Critic Ken Tucker says the anthology "resurrects a nearly lost, vital, invaluable voice" in pop music.
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Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Tell-Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series, Vol 8. It is the latest in Columbia Records' officially-released collection of previously unreleased or alternate tracks by Bob Dylan.
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Raphael Saadiq, the lead vocalist in the late-1980s R&B band Tony! Toni! Tone!, has emerged as solo artist with his new album The Way I See It. Rock critic Ken Tucker has a review.
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Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the guitarist and singer's new album, The Blues Rolls On. Released in early September, the disc includes collaborations with B.B. King, George Thorogood, James Cotton and more.
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Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Real Animal, the new album by Austin, Texas-based underground legend Alejandro Escovedo.