LOS ANGELES — Local metalhead Rob Kurtz was reportedly called out at the grocery store yesterday for converting an old Deafheaven shirt into a face mask, extremely judgemental sources confirmed.
“I made a mask from a Deafheaven shirt. Big fucking deal,” said Kurtz. “I like them a lot, and I thought the design was cool. Metal purists have always hated them, and I get that, but this might be the one time that pestilence isn’t cool. The state of California requires us to wear masks to prevent Coronavirus, and the only thing I’m interested in spreading is good music.”
Fellow metalhead Dustin Esposito was the first person to recognize Kurtz’s mask, and felt no remorse for calling Kurtz a poser.
“Black Metal is a brutal genre. It worships death,” said Esposito. “If you’re not gonna commit to it fully, you shouldn’t even like it at all. Deafheaven writes songs about girls, for Christ’s sake — nowhere in their entire catalog is there a single mention of Odin, Yggdrasil, or Ragnarok. It’s fake metal. It would literally be better to go without a mask than expose yourself like he did… and I’m living, breathing proof of that. I bet he can’t even tell the difference between good and bad screaming.”
Kristin Belekoff, a registered nurse and metal fan herself, weighed in on Kurtz’s act.
“Wear a mask. There’s absolutely no reason not to wear a mask,” Belekoff said while searching a supply closet for a fresh set of gloves before settling on two plastic bags. “I didn’t want to take masks away from my fellow healthcare workers, and so I started making them from band shirts. But I got so fucking tired of people asking me to name my favorite album by whatever band that I’m back to scrounging around our underfunded hospital. These are strange and unprecedented times we live in, when it’d be better to be called a poser than to die from a preventable virus.”
“I’m a woman in the metal scene,” she added. “I know a thing or two about survival in the face of these gatekeeping morons.”
Esposito reportedly tried to follow Kurtz to the checkout line to ask him his top three ’90s Black Metal albums, but he was experiencing shortness of breath and couldn’t manage to speak.
Photo by James Webster.