Last Modified: Apr 1, 1999 at 2:45PM (EST)

Note: This is not offered as a sincere definition of Skuntry, rather for fun only -- "half lamentation, half lampoon, half an echo," in the words of Karl Marx. (Lovers of perverse word games with hours on their hands should consult our literary models – the Futurist, Vorticist and Communist Manifestoes – to see who we’re lampooning.)

We stayed up for days, we wrote, deleted and minimized files, we boiled fish pepper soup and drank local honey beer, when stumped we took breaks for shirts versus skins team ping-pong. When that would not do we piled into Josey’s wagon, cranked up the Skuntry music and left melted rubber on the parkways of New Jersey, talking loud over the loud music and wishing we smoked cigarettes like the manifesto scribblers of yore.

We stayed awake on the adrenaline of ambition because we felt ourselves alone in this work, alone, awake and the hour was late, we were skunks scurrying through a world of crabby, vindictive, poisoning human beings. Only the scent, the scent alone of Skuntry to protect us, and entrusted in us, the bottling of that essence so it could be passed to posterity and perhaps save others from aesthetic Death, their striped pelts blotched and hung out to dry in the glare of mass culture. Sometimes even we wished for Death, narcotic Death to free us from our burden!

Yet on we pondered, never losing heart, eyes seared by monitor glow, bleared by honey beer. We took one last spin in the Skuntry wagon, wondering if perhaps we ought to drive her into the lakes of Packanack and Pompton and leave Skuntry one of our time’s untold mysteries, a cave painting of the soul for future archaeology to discover, mourn and hymn. When abruptly we looked at each other and cried, in the unison of skunks littered on the same day, "Alack! We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! We have the internet in the basement, throbbing from the server through the phone lines to every cranny of the Skuntry-starved world! We must manifest!"

The words had scarcely left our mouths when Joe spun around the wagon with the frenzy of a dog with a piano freshly dropped on his tail, and high-tailed it to his basement in Wayne where, our souls smeared with good skunk musk— with celestial skunk, punk and country — we, bruised and beer’d but not undone, penned, or rather keyed and moused and scanned, our Skuntry Manifesto; yes, unafraid, sure to be confirmed in the light of future reason, we declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:

*

A spectre is haunting the internet and band widths of sound -- the spectre of Skuntry. All the powers of gutless yuppiedum, rank hipsterhood and snub- nosed audiophilia have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. Our epoch, the epoch of Garth Brooks and the Stone Temple Pilots, The Bridges of Madison County and the fiction of John Grisham, possesses this distinct feature: it has simplified the conflict between That Which is Pallid, Flat, Puffed-up and Phony, and that which is real, ragged, home-made and true – Skuntry.

Why poison ourselves? Why rot? Why tolerate unopposed that absurd swindle that is called popular music and the best-seller list? Because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of overly clean music and lobotomized literature which has for too long held the people in thrall, we deem it high time the founding fathers of Skuntry openly, in the face of the whole world, publish our views, our aims, our tendencies, our music, our sketches, our recipes, the world elders we love, their songs and stories and pictures and jokes and recipes, the sources of our songs, the sources of our elders’ songs, links to every other word we use, links to every other word they use – to publish this cavalcade of truth and fable and thereby meet this blaspheming nursery tale of the spectre with a Manifesto of Skuntry:

1. We intend to sing songs drawn from all the worlds tongues, all the worlds tales, everybody’s magic spells and obscure poems, their riddles and proverbs and drinking songs, their hymns to Goddesses and ditties they whistle in the dark to keep away the monsters; and we intend to record the people of the world singing and saying such things for themselves, especially those people who are getting on in years without getting famous, and who drink coffee and/or beer with us, and who are nice.

2. In place of the old wants from the old days of Skuntry, which were satisfied by the production of skunky country punk and pop music, we now find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the sounds of distant lands and climes, and poets too. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self- sufficiency, we seek intercourse in every direction, universal inter- dependence of idiom, creed and sound. National and ethnic single-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures and traditions, there arises a world Skuntry. Though the old stuff is still cool.

3. Up to now much crap has been exalted as authentic, profound, root. We shall exalt no crap.

4. Yet there has also been much of crushing beauty and value presented to the world and this continues to be so, and while we would like to claim much of it as Skuntry, we recognize we bear no responsibility for its genius and power. Skuntry preceded and will outlive us; we did not create, but only named It, and we are grateful to follow, faithful and fearless, along the roads gloriously blazed by our intrepid Skuntry mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, big sisters and brothers, whom we will identify and praise by name at every opportunity.

5. In an abysmal time when the great distributor-merchants rule over everything and everywhere impose their nauseating commercial limitations, Skuntry.com declares inexorable war on the base, rickety, vulgar and fetid shams that go by the names of the recording and publishing industries. How to do this, we do not know, but we will start by selling our music real cheap and giving our words and pictures away. What, above all, is clear, is that The Majors, The Big Wigs, are their own grave-diggers; their fall and the victory of Skuntry are equally inevitable. All that is cheezy melts into air, all that is bland is perfumed by musk of skunk.

6. OUR POSITION IN RELATION TO THE VARIOUS EXISTING COMPETING ENDEAVORS AND THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS STUCK WORKING FOR THE MAN. Skuntry.com declares that it knows no competition, only friends, enemies and brothers and sisters stuck working for the man. Anyone doing that which we wish to do – that is, "competition," in the eyes of the world – we call friends; we embrace and bless them and welcome them into our fold, if they wish, or will wave to them and visit them in their fold, if they wish. As for our enemies, see article (5) for our declaration of war. As for brothers and sisters stuck working for the man, we mourn the pain of these laborers who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market; and we everywhere support their every revolutionary movement against the base, rickety, vulgar and fetid shams that go by the names of the recording and publishing industries. And if they ever want to release an honest record almost no one will hear and for which they will scarcely be paid, buzz us.

7. Our medium, the internet and disc, and our message, Skuntry, must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. Skuntry souls of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the holes in your record collection!

Post-Post-script:
It should be noted that while the above represents as perfect a manifesto of Skuntry as can be written, it is innately imperfect. For as all who know Skuntry in their hearts can attest, to borrow from Lao Tzu, the Skuntry that can be written is not the true Skuntry; the Skuntry that can be spoken is not the true Skuntry. Skuntry is at its core simulatneously mystical and mathematical, that is, musical. So it is that the truest manifesto can only be one which is strummed and sung.

But Skuntry will not be so easily categorized - it showers, like a fountain, equal love upon the East and the West, the Spring and the Autumn, the Snarl and the Smile. Its Cause is Everyman's. Thus the true embodiment of the Skuntry Chung lies in two sister songs from Crumbling in the Rain:

• Full Pocket is the impish, brazen Skuntry. He's the loud drunk at the end of the bar. He's the first in the room to take his shirt off. His parties are frequent and cost more than he has, and something usually gets broken.

• Rum in the Workshop is the Skuntry at peace with his imperfections and who loves you for yours. He painstakingly collects every seashell in the world to leave to his children. He'd stop buying rounds if he realized they just make that loud drunk nastier.