Ken Tucker

Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and nonfiction book author.

Early life and education

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.

Career

While attending NYU, he began writing freelance reviews for The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, and Rolling Stone. 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, DVD critic and an editor-at-large until 2013, 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.

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. He appears in the 1984 documentary The Gospel According to Al Green.

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.

Awards

For his critical writings, Tucker was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 1984, the first rock critic to become a Pulitzer finalist. He won a National Magazine Award in 1995 and has twice won a Deems Taylor Award by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

Writings

Articles and essays

Tucker has written frequently about poetry and comic books, most notably for The New York Times Book Review and The Best American Poetry blog. His 1985 New York Times review 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.

He has contributed essays to the following anthologies:

Miller, Jim, ed. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1st Ed., New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1976. Country: The Music and the Musicians, New York: Abbeville Press, 1988. Cooking and Stealing: The TIN HOUSE Non-Fiction Reader, New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2004.

Books

Scarface Nation – The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America, New York City, New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. Tucker, Ken; Stokes, Geoffrey; Ward, Ed. Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll, New York: Summit, 1986. Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy – 100 Things To Love and Hate About TV, New York City, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005.