Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music’ on Max, A Stirring, Enduring Testament To Performance, Identity, And American History 

In Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (Max), actor, singer, playwright, performance artist, and MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant winner Taylor Mac presents a version of his epically-realized 2016 show in New York City, which featured him in song and performance across 240 years – one decade per hour, from 1776 to 2016 – over a day that turned into a night that turned back into a day. The doc is directed and produced by Academy Award winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt), who also won a Grammy for their 2019 film Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice; guest performers in Mac’s ensemble include Thornetta Davis, Erin Hill, and Heather Christian.  

TAYLOR MAC’S 24-DECADE OF POPULAR MUSIC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “Maybe you noticed,” Taylor Mac says from the stage, resplendent in drag and revealing witty truths about the American Songbook, “this is my subjective take on history. I’m not really interested in the show being about history as much as I’m interested in it being about all of us in this room have a lot of history on our backs, and we’re trying to figure out what to do with it.” Mac’s ambitious, thoroughly-realized undertaking was to perform for 24 hours straight, minus a few logistic interludes, in a show exploring “a queer body becoming a metaphor for America” with its ecstatic melange of history, popular song, camp, drag performance, and audience participation. Presented here in a documentary format, the hours of 24-Decade History and their respective musical decades appear as onscreen prompts, accompanied by interview cutaways with Mac, his show co-director Niegel Smith, musical director Matt Ray, and Machine Dazzle, Mac’s costume designer and regular collaborator.

To say Machine was excited for the opportunity is an understatement, and understatement isn’t really a category in 24-Decade History. “Oh my god, I get to make 24, like, historical period costumes, but my way?” The designer’s creations fuse history and pop culture references with signifiers of gay identity, glamor, and physical artifacts from over two centuries; for songs that were belted out in the American pubs of 1796, Mac is adorned with a headdress fashioned from wine corks. It’s history cut with revisionism and songcraft as the uglier truths of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Coal Black Rose” are revealed, and Ray says it was their challenge to dig up these songs’ true meanings, and present the lyrics with a new ear. And by hour eight, 1846-1856, Mac is leading a “Father of American Music Smackdown” on stage between the problematic Stephen Foster and “radical fairy poet” Walt Whitman. Machine’s costuming for that one features flowers, gay male erotica (which Whitman wrote), and potato chip bags, the latter of which were invented in 1853.

The theme of community is central to 24-Decade History, in both the bonds it can create and the loved ones lost forever. Mac frequently stirs up a kind of chaotic joy in the audience, disrupting their static enjoyment, and as the show stretches overnight, attendees are seen to break out pillows or crash in the lobby for a few hours. They’re all in this together. But there is also conscious subtraction, with one musician per hour departing the ensemble in a representation of everyone the gay community lost during the decade of HIV and AIDS. And by show’s end, at noon the next day, it’s just Taylor Mac on stage, together with the audience that has endured.   

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? One of the directors of photography for 24-Decade History is Ellen Kuras, a frequent collaborator of Martin Scorsese who also contributed to the simultaneously wild and contemplative David Johansen doc Personality Crisis: One Night Only, which Scorsese co-directed. And while Mac admits a little projection here – he doesn’t actually know if the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” was on the jukebox at the Stonewall inn in Greenwich Village – the foundational protests that emerged from Stonewall have been considered in many worthy films. (24-Decade History director Rob Epstein won an Academy Award for The Times of Harvey Milk, and Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman also wrote and directed The Celluloid Closet.)

Performance Worth Watching: The costumes created by Machine Dazzle and worn onstage by Taylor Mac are acts of spectacle, of thematic centering, and the product of a fully realized visual sense. These are pieces that inspire you to consider them from every angle at once.  

Memorable Dialogue: It’s a powerful part of 24-Decade History to see its musicians carried off the stage, one by one, hour by hour, as a realization of grief and loss. “You fall in love, and then somebody’s gone,” Mac says about the emotions that guided the entire project. “[It] started with the idea of making a show that was a metaphorical representation of the AIDS epidemic, specifically about how communities build themselves because they’re being torn apart.”

Sex and Skin: Well, how about a battle and eventual sexual encounter between two gigantic inflatable phalluses, one in colors of the US flag, the other featuring the hammer and sickle of the USSR? Taylor Mac warns the audience that they will be covered in the ejaculate of these giant Cold War dicks, which is revealed in streamer form. 

Our Take: Making a documentary about a performance and show that lasts for 24 whole hours would be a probably impossible exercise in real time filmmaking, so it’s natural for Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music to exist both onstage and off, in both full costume and makeup and in quieter behind-the-scenes interviews. And Mac is an interesting presence in both, able to carry the performance completely with bawdy humor, strong vocals, and asides that skewer the moldy stories told in history books – his band is great, too, but Mac is always centerstage – and offer deeper context for the show’s inspiration in the cutaways.

Obviously, to be in the room for all of its scope and spectacle would have felt inclusive in a way this doc can’t really access. “I’m interested in what happens when the audience has to make a commitment to something,” Mac says, and we see that nearly nobody in that space is allowed to just sit and watch. But we aren’t afforded that same sense of immersion, and 24-Decade History doesn’t fully represent the endurance side of audience participation beyond a few nods to people occasionally dozing. What it’s great at however is considering the triple perspectives of Mac, costume designer Machine Dazzle, and makeup artist Anastasia Durasova as they visually realize the show’s themes with its star as a canvas. Seeing Machine’s creations come to fruition on Mac’s frame, watching Durasova carefully apply runs of drippy mascara to create tears that just won’t stop, or to see Mac scratch away a facial applique of glitter in a determined closeup – these are moments where 24-Decade History, as a film, can bring even more layers to the artist’s already deeply considered performance.

Our Call: Stream It. Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music is an epic journey of visuals, musical performance, and meta-community that powerfully manifests both its marathon scope and weighty themes.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges