Anthony Bozza

Anthony Bozza is a New York City-based author and journalist who is most famous for his writing in Rolling Stone. Bozza is also well known for his bestselling books on musicians which include rapper Eminem and hard rock band AC/DC as well as his work as co-author on the autobiographies of artists which include Slash, INXS, and Tommy Lee.

Anthony Bozza started his career as an intern at Rolling Stone, fact-checking, coffee-fetching and doing research for other writers before they hired him full-time in the music department. He answered phones, he edited columns and did the odd story, but his big break came after a friend turned him on to an unsigned white rapper from Detroit named Eminem. That tape of a live Eminem freestyle was unlike anything he’d ever heard. He began talking the rapper up to his editors, who told him that if the kid ever got signed they’d let Anthony do a short blurb about him. Fast forward a year to Bozza writing the first national cover story on Eminem, a piece that changed everything for both writer and subject. Bozza wrote six more cover stories, numerous features, and countless other articles during his seven-year tenure at Rolling Stone. He wrote and edited the iconic “Random Notes” section for two years, joining the ranks of “Random Notes” alumnae like Cameron Crowe and MTV’s Kurt Loder. In 2002, the path to his first cover story came full circle when Bozza left the magazine to write his first bestseller.

Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem, was born of the unparalleled access and countless hours spent with Marshall Mathers while working on his Rolling Stone features and beyond. Janet Maslin, culture critic at the New York Times, wrote that it was a “compelling” investigation of the “Shadyfication of America.” The book is more than a biography, it contextualizes Eminem as a signpost of the race, class and cultural temperature of America. The book was a New York Times bestseller and an international bestseller, topping lists in England, Germany, France and South America.

Bozza followed up this success with a new challenge: co-writing. Unlike his work at Rolling Stone, he got to ask the questions, but he also wrote the answers; he analyzed his subjects, then revealed his findings, through their perspective rather than his own. His first outing was a pop cultural icon as infamous as Eminem, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, which yielded the New York Times Bestseller Tommyland. A biography of Australian legends INXS followed, then came what Rolling Stone ranked one of the top 5 rock autobiographies of all time, the New York Times Bestseller Slash, co-written with the notoriously taciturn Guns N' Roses guitarist. Bozza moved into the comedy world next, with the autobiography of stand-up veteran and Howard Stern co-host Artie Lange, Too Fat to Fish. The book debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for twenty-two weeks. Bozza returned to music analysis with his next book, the critically acclaimed, Why AC/DC Matters, which inspired a series of Why _ Matters books in AC/DC’s native Australia, Bozza’s tome being Volume 1. Two more co-writes followed, I Am the New Black, the autobiography of 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live star Tracy Morgan, and Purpose, with Wyclef Jean of the Fugees.

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