Little Big and the viral Gesamtkunstwerk

Abstract

ABSTRACT In an interview, Il’ia Prusikin, the founding member of the punk-rave group Little Big, confessed that he has always loved to ‘confound expectations’. The creative evolution of Little Big has succeeded in confounding expectations, if not astonishing. Initially dubbed ‘the most disgusting group in Russia’ for their sexually suggestive and grotesque music videos such as ‘Big Dick’ and ‘Give me Your Money’, Little Big’s recent cycles ‘Antipositive’ and ‘Uno’ are distinguished by their densely comedic audiovisuality that harkens back to Russian modernist theatrical (notably Vsevolod Meyerhold) and gag cinema traditions. The audio, by contrast, consists of irresistible dance tracks and lyrics that combine largely nonsensical polyglot phrases with animal sounds for the ultimate lyrical realisation of Aleksei Kruchenykh’s zaum. Little Big’s signature complex of comic audio-visual devices is a means of what the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovskii referred to as ostranenie (defamiliarization): it surprises and cognitively challenges the viewer, and ultimately coalesces into a distinctive posthuman aesthetics. From ‘Skibidi’ to ‘Tacos’, Little Big deploys these devices as a form of soft stiob for the purpose of parody of the music video tradition, but principally to create a universalist and therefore viral style that transcends national borders.