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

While attending NYU, he began writing freelance reviews for The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, and Rolling Stone.

Since 1982, Tucker has been a rock and pop music critic for the National Public Radio (NPR) talk show Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

[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.

[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.