Chuck Eddy is a music journalist from Detroit known for his eclectic taste and unorthodox, strongly held opinions. He has written for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone, and published three books to date: Stairway to Hell, The Accidental History of Rock'n'Roll, and Rock'n'Roll Never Forgets. Magnificent crank.

"I get mad at people who say I’m a contrarian. That’s honestly not where I come from. It probably does sound that way to a lot of people. I’m never going to hear the end of Teena Marie being in the Top 10 of Stairway to Hell. People think I set out to pull a fast one. I’ve said this over and over again: I went to my shelves and pulled out every album that, at one point in heavy metal’s history, could be called heavy metal — basically, loud guitars. Call me expedient. Call me lazy; I didn’t go back and listen to every Iron Maiden album when I wrote that book. But I was not being contrarian. It’s not to pull a fast one. And it’s not to say that everybody else is wrong. It’s to say, 'This is an interesting way to look at music.'

"My opinion is that false metal is a kind of metal. That sounds like a joke, but to pop-metal fans, it was metal. It’s not like everybody agrees with each other anyway. To pretend there ever really has been a consensus among rock critics is a lie."

– Interview with Chuck Eddy by Michaelangelo Matos for the Los Angeles Review of Books