Are Britpoppers okay? Former Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown recently blasted mask-wearing on Twitter, a stance he doubled down on after receiving criticism, and now Noel Gallagher has spoken out against face masks, too. As Stereogum points out, during a recent appearance on The Matt Morgan Podcast, Gallagher went on a tirade about the issue, saying, "I don’t wear a mask, no. The whole fucking thing is bollocks. You’re supposed to wear them in Selfridges but you can fucking go down to the pub and be surrounded by every fucking cunt. Oh well, actually, we don’t have the virus in the pubs, but we have it in Selfridges, oh alright."
"I was going up to Manchester the other weekend and some guy’s going, 'Oh, can you put your mask on?' on the train, and they said the transport police would get on and fine you a thousand pounds, but you don’t have to put it on when you’re eating," Gallagher continues. "So I said alright, so this killer virus that’s sweeping through the train is gonna come and attack me and see me having a sandwich and say, ‘Leave him.'"
"There’s too many fucking liberties being taken away from us," he continues. "I’ve been in shops today, ‘Have you got a mask?’ ‘No I haven’t.’ ‘You’ve got to wear a mask.’ ‘Says who?’ ‘Says the manager.’ ‘Well, who's the manager?' I don’t give a fuck, I choose not to wear one. If I get the virus, it’s on me. It’s not on anyone else. If every other cunt’s wearing a mask, I’m not gonna catch it off them. And if I’ve got it, they’re not going to catch it off me. I think it’s a piss take...The science anyway says it’s pointless." Listen to his remarks in full below.
Far from saying it's pointless, The CDC recommends that people wear masks in public, and when around people you don't live with, primarily to prevent those who have the virus from spreading it to others. A mask "helps keep respiratory droplets contained and from reaching other people," they write, citing a list of recent studies. The Mayo Clinic agrees.
Apparently Noel would rather align himself with the likes of attendees at this recent Utah protest, one of whom tried to drew parallels between wearing a mask and George Floyd's murder by police, than science.
Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor, meanwhile, feels very differently than Noel about masks. Speaking on a recent episode of Dean Delray's Let There Be Talk podcast, Taylor was adamant: mask up, or get out:
It burned up again, because our mayor is a dipshit. This thing is gonna fucking — it’s gonna keep doing that until it evens out, man. It’s gonna keep doing it until we get a vaccine, to be honest, or at least something that can prevent.
Vegas, it’s up and down. There are still a bunch of fucking mooks with no masks on at the casinos. And, actually, the people who were there — tourists or visitors or whatever — were giving shit to people who were wearing masks. That was enough for me to just go, "You know what, man? Fuck you!"
It’s, like, not everything has to be a political fucking statement. It’s better to just be cautious. It’s better to be smart. You wanna walk around with no fucking mask on, you go ahead and spin the barrel, and let’s see how many times you can click it. But these people who are actually trying to be preventive, there’s no reason for you to give them a rash of shit — they weren’t fucking saying anything to you. It’s just ridiculous, man.
That’s the shit that people aren’t talking about — the fact that some people are just minding their own fucking business, and a bunch of garbage fucking falls out of people’s faces, and it just keeps the fucking wheel spinning.
Maybe if we all just kind of kept some shit to ourselves, maybe shit would fucking quiet down.
