Ann Powers
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She writes for NPR.org and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music podcasts.
One of the nation's most notable music critics, Powers has been writing for NPR Music since April 2011.
Powers served as chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times from 2006 until she joined NPR. Prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was senior critic at Blender and senior curator at Experience Music Project. From 1997 to 2001 Powers was a pop critic at The New York Times and before that worked as a senior editor at the Village Voice. Powers began her career working as an editor and columnist at San Francisco Weekly.
Her writing extends beyond the web, magazines and newspapers. Powers co-wrote Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, with Amos, which was published in 2005. In 1999, Power's book Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America was published. She was the editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the 1995 book Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop and the editor of Best Music Writing 2010.
After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University, Powers went on to receive a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of California. [Copyright 2025 NPR]
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In the latest Superman film, Lois Lane and Clark Kent have a fight about what's more punk: edginess or kindness. The fate of something more than the mosh pit hangs in the balance. -
The Beach Boys' co-founder, songwriter and producer transformed pop music into high art and became America's answer to The Beatles' Lennon and McCartney in the process. -
Pulp was the wittiest, bitterest star in the Britpop constellation. On More, the band's first new album in 24 years, singer Jarvis Cocker is learning to trust his feelings. -
In 2021, Wallen was caught on video uttering a racial slur. Since then, he's become the most commercially successful musician in country and popular music. How? By remaining committed to ambivalence. -
In 2025, fandom is complicated. Music is at nearly everyone's fingertips. Concert ticket prices are through the roof. Some fans take devotion to new extremes. What do we owe to the artists we love? -
Even as the songs on Forever Is a Feeling chronicle a love that's come to fruition in public, Dacus still creates a particular kind of safe space for the fans who delight in swooning with her. -
In some ways, COVID shrank the distance between musicians and listeners. But then, it also threw nearly everything about the industry into disarray, and for many, things have never been the same. -
Critic Ann Powers considers musical performances that have left audiences stunned in utter silence, and what you can hear when sound falls away. -
The sometimes-transgressive pop star has a new album, Mayhem, that seems poised to recapture the confrontational darkness of her early work. There's more than one reason to hope it's true. -
Last week, the hottest ticket in NYC wasn't the SNL 50th anniversary concert. It was the three nights Paul McCartney played at a tiny downtown venue that usually hosts up-and-coming indie rock bands.
