Dude Offline

Dude Offline
Inspired By Bogarted Brews
By: Adam Bernard
Last updated September 2nd , 2009

When your roommate drinks all your beer, usually all you get out of it is a trip to the store. When Dude Offline found his roommate had committed this heinous crime against him, he skipped the store and instead made a song that became one of the longest running hits in college radio history.

The song, titled "You Suck You Drank My Beer," was a punk rock gem that stayed in college radio's top ten for over a full year. After recording music for over two decades with various different bands and under an equal amount of monikers, however, Dude Offline was starting to feel a little burned out. He needed some new inspiration.

Sometimes inspiration can be found at home, but in Dude Offline's case it took going from his native west coast, where he has lived in Los Angeles, Seattle and Phoenix, to the Ukraine. "I had an apartment in the Urkaine," he explains, "because my fiancé is in Moldova, so we would stay in Odessa, Ukraine, and commute back and forth."

It was during his trips to see his fiancée that Dude Offline made a musical discovery. "I noticed that when I was in Europe, they play mostly dance beats with their music now and when I came home I didn't hear that very much. It was starting, but there wasn't very much of it yet. I thought, ‘I want to have some fun. I'm gonna do what Svetlana and I were dancing on the floor to, all these dance beats, and I'm gonna put it to my punk rock music, my rock 'n roll'." Inspiration had clearly hit for Dude Offline. "I thought it was fun that dance pop was coming back. I always enjoyed it as a kid, but I've also been a heavy rocker, too, so I thought it would be fun to do both and write music that I can play my guitars in and put some really cool beats to."

Suddenly, a man who thought he may had seen his last days as an artist was reborn and the Dude Offline persona was created. He picked up a vocorder and recorded the album Monkey Baby, which is currently getting airplay on over 150 radio stations nationwide and includes a pop/rock remake of "You Suck You Drank My Beer" titled "It's Not My Problem." According to Dude Offline, he feels the most important quality of his work, and what people really connect with, is the way he keeps everything fun. "I'm quite the jokester," he explains, "I have a lot of fun because I think that's what music's about. Let's go have some fun." This is very evident on Monkey Baby, which also includes the comedic songs "Candy Girl" and "Cyber Girl."

Dude Offline manages to be serious on occasion, and the rare times he shows that side of himself, it garners just as much acclaim as his humorous work. "I Can't Stop Thinking About You," which isn't available on CD yet, is a perfect example of this. "It's basically a story where you're going forward and everything around you is going backwards. It's a lot of thinking about things and putting things together, and thinking about life in general."

Seriousness was thrown out the window during a spring break festival in Daytona Beach, FL, that Dude Offline performed at last year and it resulted in quite the show of nudity. "There was a Playboy Playmate of the Month there," he remembers, "she had been at a booth signing autographs and handing out some of our CDs and the other women were getting so jealous because of all these guys just surrounding her for autographs that two of them actually stood up on a table next to me, took their tops off and started shaking their breasts up and down yelling out ‘look, look, we got boobs, too!'"

Now that's some inspiration most any man can enjoy. For Dude Offline it was especially nice because it was the kind of inspiration that didn't negatively affect his stock of beer.
- 101 Distribution

You Asked For It: Dude Offline
By Martin Cizmar in You Asked for ItTuesday, Jun. 9 2009 @ 4:58PM
Dude Offline
Monkey Baby
Ramper Records


GRADE: B


We've been doing You Asked For It for just over a year now and it's about time we had our first repeat customer. Dude Offline got his first record, Nerd Love, reviewed by Niki D'Andrea last year, and now he's waited long enough for his seven song mini-album Monkey Baby to get a turn.


Unlike it's more eclectic predecessor, Monkey Baby is pretty much straight up nerdtronica with vocoder vocals, pounding beats and rough-edged synthesizers I'd feel comfortable comparing to The Faint. Surprisingly, it all works pretty well. Despite the cover - hopelessly uncool even if we imagine it was conceived from the most ironic of aesthetics - and the sometimes forced references, Dude (aka Shawn Armenta) makes some pretty good dance music.

"Sucks To Be You" starts with clanging chords of distorted guitar and stringy beats that remind me something out of an 80s film score - you could picture Ferris Bueller clicking off this station in Cameron's dad's car. The second song, "Monkey Baby" has more of a Eurotrash disco feel, which is reinforced by the theme, which seems like the sort of joke that'd appeal to people speaking English as a second language. To it's credit, it's pretty catchy and not really that far from what you'd hear a band like Chromeo ("Tenderoni") do -- and Chromeo is, by all accounts, very cool.

Though Dude Offline claims The Ramones to be his biggest influence, "Candy Girl," is even more like a Chromeo song. By dropping some of the nerd posturing (the last song, a semi-remix called, "Cyber Girl" covers that ground) he makes a song I could honestly hear one of the more adventurous DJs at Shake! spinning.

"It's Not My Problem" is a remix/followup to Dude's "You Suck, You Drank My Beer!" and nowhere near as fresh sounding as the next track, "I'm A Herper," which actually appears to be about snake handling, though I greatly prefer an alternate definition and will, in fact, use that definition in the future.

If you're a musician from the Phoenix metro area and would like to submit a CD for review, please send it in an envelope marked "YAFI" to:

Martin Cizmar
You Asked For It
c/o Phoenix New Times
1201 E. Jefferson Street
Phoenix , AZ 85032

Tags: Chromeo, Dude Offline, Herper, Monkey Baby Related - Phoenix News Times