Playboy Manbaby is taking ‘Violence’ on the road

“Violence is coming January 6th!” Robbie Pfeffer declared in a video posted to Instagram in November of last year. A statement that made every follower of Playboy Manbaby stop scrolling, to say the least. 

“That’s right, the brand new Playboy Manbaby album entitled ‘Violence’ is hitting the streets January 6th,” the message continued.

With an obvious nod to the 2021 January 6 protests, where thousands stormed and ransacked the nation’s Capitol (and have since been pardoned), Robbie was making a statement announcing the latest project from the Phoenix punk natives. 

In the video, Robbie, draped in a boxy taupe colored suit, rocks a mic headset you’d expect to see on Tony Robbins while preaching to a convention hall full of corporate dorks who just can’t figure it out. All of it felt like a normcore-laced pastiche of the 1987 film “Wall Street,” starring Michael Douglas. 

Fans were being ushered into Playboy Manbaby’s new era. The new album from Playboy Manbaby delivers its music unabashedly, violently even, unafraid of pulling the potent political punches that have become the band’s trademark over the years.  

Before the announcement, another video riled fans and friends close to the band in a different way. In it, Robbie and bandmate TJ Friga are seated calmly, revealing that the band had, in fact, broken up.   

“Yeah, that went over way differently than I thought it would”, Robbie chuckles. “I got a call from my mom saying that she was getting calls from her coworkers, and they’re like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’” What the fuck was happening was a brilliant rollout of the band’s first new album in eight years. Playboy Manbaby was no longer a band. They were now a self-anointed corporation, as revealed twenty-four hours later in a following post, and ‘Violence’ was their flagship product.

Spending a few hours with the album, it became clear that ‘Violence’ was attempting to say something. Anything. Desperately against the tidal wave of nothing that has seemingly taken center stage in pop culture. Out the gate, the opening track “Shitshow” kicks off the album with Robbie screaming “All these egomaniacal phonies! I wish someone would fucking Kill Tony!” on the chorus. A devilish smile arced across my face as I cruised westbound down the I-10. It hit like a group chat conversation spilling out into real life: wrong but cathartic to finally hear out loud. Having watched the rise of the Kill Tony show’s brand of shock humor take over the standup comedy world, I understood the sentiment deeply.

“It’s all just so exhaustingly 2006 YouTube, where it’s just like, you are so goddamn boring, and all of your ideas are so bad,” Robbie tells me. He is relaxed in his Globe, Arizona home, primed for the band’s upcoming 12-city ‘Corporations Are People Toour’ tour. “And it’s not just comedy. It’s speeches by JD Vance. It’s all of these kinds of smirks and like, hidden racism and less-hidden racism, you know what I mean? From (viral content creator) Tony doing, like, fake Chinese accents to JD Vance saying, ‘You don’t have to be afraid to be white anymore,’ It’s all that same boring, fucking derivative slurry of just like nothing.” Certainly a far cry from what was happening throughout their new album.

When asked about how the album speaks to the political violence dominating the media today, especially in the wake of the Renee Good shooting by ICE agents, Robbie says, “I stared directly into the void for the whole first Trump presidency.”

“I paid attention to every blow of it. And then the second time, when it became clear, like, we’re going to go through this, I knew that I couldn’t look at it directly,” Pfeffer reveals. “They laid out the plan. They told you what they were going to do. They told you what their goals were. They told you who they were as people. Like, all of this is so obvious and right there.”

“Violence” demands that people pay attention to what matters to make change, while threading a theme of regret. “Good Times” from the new album encapsulates a sense of despair and solemn reflection. “It’s hard to know it’s the good times, when it’s the good times,” Robbie belts out morosely on the chorus. One of my fondest memories of seeing Playboy Manbaby live was at Crescent Ballroom’s short-lived 2019 Flying Burrito Festival, performing in the backlot of now-defunct studio space, The Pueblo. A few hundred fans were cupped in the palms of Robbie’s hands as he directed everyone to look upon the since-closed Chase Tower and truly appreciate reveling in the shadow of the bank building. Robbie Pfeffer has always been a sociopolitical provocateur in Phoenix’s cultural scene. 

“People are so familiar with the rhythms of watching things they like just get burned down for no reason… restaurants, bands, artists, like anything that seems like good fun..  is just getting like, just bulldozed”, Robbie reflects. A ubiquitous feeling in a post-pandemic landscape. “So it’s just like, yeah, of course, this tiny band from Phoenix got destroyed by it. Like, everything’s getting destroyed. Why not this?” Robbie spills on the defeated reaction fans gave the band’s “breakup” announcement before revealing their “incorporation” just a day later.

Pfeffer wields this ironic reluctance in turning the band into a corporation to comedic effect. A quick read of the band’s bio on streaming platforms doubles down on this: “Finally, someone who can give a voice to a group that has never been treated fairly. Corporations.” Darkly funny but not without any poignance. Pfeffer believes that even the rising prevalence of big corporate-sponsored art has become more gross and corrosive than most of us can fully appreciate. 

“I was just talking to someone about LCD Soundsystem, which is one of my, like, all-time favorite bands, like to get tickets first to the show, you have to have a certain type of platinum Visa membership.” Robbie is referring to the American Express partnership with Live Nation that gives Amex cardholders first dibs on concert presale tickets. “And I’m like, dude, you used to be the kind of like, a cool New York thing, and that is the lamest, most corporate shit you could possibly do.”

Playboy Manbaby’s first show on the Corporations Are People Toour begins in Tucson at Club Congress. Although the group played the Crescent Ballroom on New Year’s Eve, when asked why the hometown wasn’t on the official tour, Robbie says, “TJ lives in Tucson. We are very disparate now in this sort of thing. Dave and Chad are the only people who are in the band who live in Phoenix now.”

Pfeffer’s eagerness to take the album on tour is rooted in the band’s newfound ability to finally take the masquerade they’re infamous for putting on local stages on the road.

“It’s a whole different experience, and we’ve done that with Phoenix shows, but we’ve never done that nationally. My hope is it’s the kind of thing where if you’ve seen us five times before or whatever, this is going to be different,” Robbie reassures me, adding, “The fact that people are kind of trusting me on it and already like buying tickets to see it where they’re like, ‘I don’t know what this is going to be, but I’m just going to trust that these two nerdy dudes are just going to show up and do something that’s going to be fun’ and like, that’s cool as hell.”

Playboy Manbaby sets the corporate party off on the Corporations Are People Toour on Thursday, February 19th at Club Congress.