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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Swift's previous albums focused on the love she yearned for. The dozen songs on her latest release combine to form a picture of true love found, tested and proven strong.
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In 1973, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, then struggling musicians, released an album that inspired Mick Fleetwood to invite them to join his band. Buckingham Nicks has just been remastered.
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Big Thief has a new album, as does Zach Top, a young country singer with roots in old country. And the Icelandic-Chinese singer Laufey brings a classical-music and jazz influence to her pop songs.
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Clinton is the leader of two important funk bands, Parliament and Funkadelic. In 1975, Parliament released Mothership Connection, a loose concept album about funk musicians as galactic invaders.
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The three-sister band HAIM and pop singer and TikTok star Addison Rae are practicing "emotional passive resistance" this summer — and it sounds great.
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At its best, this capacious grab-bag of 83 songs, some dating back to the 1980s, yields not just good music, but songs that seem unlike anything else Springsteen has ever done.
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On Cruel Joke, Pomeroy, age 22, sings with an acoustic twang about farms and cowboys. The 92-year-old Nelson's Oh What a Beautiful World is an album of covers of songs by Rodney Crowell.
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Thomas' April 23 death at age 71 brings to a close one of the most significant avant-garde experiments ever conducted within the confines of pop music. Rock critic Ken Tucker reflects on his legacy.
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Lamar's duet with SZA samples Luther Vandross' 1982 hit "If This World Were Mine." The song was written by Marvin Gaye, who himself recorded it in 1967 as a duet with Tammi Terrell.
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Dacus mixes confession and intimacy on Forever is a Feeling. The EVEN MORE Freewheelin' Jeffrey Lewis nods to Dylan's early New York City folkie days, with a great song about the pain of existence.