Nihilist Arby's

2015

Date: January 2015 · Place: Twitter; Chicago · Figures: Brendan Kelly, operator · Lawrence Arms, his band · Arby's corporate, the unwitting subject · Tags: Twitter, Parody, Brand 01. Roast Beef of the Void In January 2015 Brendan Kelly, frontman of the Chicago punk band Lawrence Arms, registers @nihilist_arbys. Every tweet is a corporate marketing line ending in cosmic despair. At Arby's, we have the meats. They are stacked in piles. So are all the dead. The account hits 200,000 followers in six months. Arby's actual social team, run by Josh Martin, plays along publicly and reportedly tries to hire Kelly. He declines. He keeps his identity quiet until a Splitsider interview reveals him in March 2015. 02. Parody Beats the Brand Nihilist Arby's is the moment brand-voice and shitpost-voice collapse into each other. The parody is funnier than the corporate account because the corporate account is already shaped like a parody. Kelly later writes the entire account is a Camus footnote about advertising under late capitalism. The real Arby's account leans into the same register through 2016 and 2017 under Josh Martin. The Wendy's roast era arrives downstream from this lineage. Sources • Megh Wright, 'Talking to the Guy Behind the Nihilist Arby's Twitter Account', Splitsider, 30 March 2015 • Brendan Kelly, Reasons to Quit (Three One G, 2016) liner notes • Eater, 'How Arby's Got Funny on Twitter', 13 September 2016