As Tone Deaf reported last week, Melbourne hardcore outfit Deez Nuts were recently caught in the middle of a US teenager’s prank that went viral online and in the mainstream media. After 15-year-old Brady Olson registered to run for president as Deez Nuts, the band woke up to a shit storm on social media.
“I’m a little behind the eight-ball at the moment, because I’m currently in Germany with my daughter, so I’m not really watching anything on television or catching up with news. It’s pretty much just constant Peppa Pig on the TV,” JJ Peters, frontman of Deez Nuts (as in the band), tells Tone Deaf.
“So I wasn’t aware of it through any kind of news sources or anything like that. I just woke up one morning and literally all of my social media outlets were being blown up with like a million messages, some confused and some excited and and it took me a minute to kind of piece together what was happening.”
So what was happening? Olson filed to run for President of the United States with the Federal Election Commission on 26th July. “When I heard about the Limberbutt McCubbins story, I realized I could,” he told The Daily Beast.
For those unfamiliar with Limberbutt McCubbins, he’s a cat from the US state of Kentucky who is also presently seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Olson took the inspiration to its most logical conclusion – asking Public Policy Polling to poll him as Deez Nuts.
Deez Nuts was pitted against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in Minnesota a few weeks ago and polled at seven percent. When his numbers rose after two more polls, Deez Nuts exploded, becoming a trending topic worldwide on Twitter and catching the attention of a few fans of the Melbourne band of the same name.
“The funniest thing that’s happened so far was Rupert Murdoch tweeted directly at us.”“When I [found out about it] it was hilarious,” explains JJ. “I wasn’t particularly surprised, to be honest, because it’s one of those things that’s so ridiculous, but America had just gone crazy for that Deez Nuts meme character – the dude that had put out that Vine that went viral.”
“It just seems to be the flavour of the month. It’s insane to me the fact that it’s gone as far as it’s gotten… But my initial thought was a little bit annoyed that it was blowing up my social media, but my second thought was that any publicity is good publicity.”
According to JJ, the reaction amongst fans has been something of a “mixed bag” with about “95 percent” in on the joke and the other five percent slowly coming around. “I think most of the confusion has come from people who aren’t fans,” explains JJ.
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Posted by Deez Nuts on Thursday, August 20, 2015
“People are just Googling or searching Deez Nuts and we’ve obviously got the most hits, so they’re confusing our Twitter or Facebook with the campaign and addressing it as the official page for the campaign.”
“We’re getting a lot of angry, hilarious tweets from super-political Americans and people who are quite well-versed in what they’re talking about, but the fact that they’re addressing it to us and taking the whole Deez Nuts thing seriously is pretty hilarious.”
They’ve even received attention from one rather prominent Australian. “The funniest thing that’s happened so far was Rupert Murdoch tweeted directly at us and referenced the band and actually referenced the fact that it was impossible for us to run for President because we’re a band from Australia,” JJ recounts.
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And how has being unwittingly caught up in the Deez Nuts 2016 campaign affected the band’s following? “I think there’s definitely a spike in our following on social media. Whether or not those people are going to stick around and listen to the albums and come to shows once they realise we’re not the guy running, I don’t know,” says JJ.
“But the first day that that stuff was going wild on the internet and news, we got about four or five thousand followers on Twitter within about 24 hours. I don’t know if that’s going to directly result in news fans for the band, but who knows?”
“Out of those five thousand people, maybe when we start posting about shows in the States — we have a tour coming up in a couple weeks in the US — maybe someone will research some stuff and find out they like it.”
