Tribeca Film Festival 2023: TAYLOR MAC’S 24-DECADE HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC

There’s lots of potential in Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, but only Taylor Mac fully lives up to it. The best compliment I can give the film, HBO’s new documentary capturing the only performance of Mac‘s titular piece of twenty-four-hour musical performance art, is that it gives us a peek at what seems to have been a fun, funny, genuinely fabulous piece of work in a “wish you could have been there” kind of way. As a film, though, there isn’t much substance. The few sporadic interviews intercut with the footage, though completely acceptable on their own terms, are so intermittent as to remind you that this could have been cooler as an old-school verité concert doc (think Stop Making Sense, Monterey Pop, etc.). The final result is an eminently watchable, totally enjoyable assembly of lovely-looking footage that could’ve been something better with just a little more TLC in the editing room.

Queering the American Songbook

At the end of the day, as an artist, performer, creative presence, and self-described “Fool in the classical sense,” Taylor Mac needs very little help holding up a feature runtime with his own work. “Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music” the performance, a day-long musical endurance test extravaganza and “radical format for creating community” was staged in October 2016 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and was subsequently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mac developed the show over five years and includes 240 American songs surveying the history of the country from its founding to the present, all embellished with lavish costumes, elaborate interactive play with the audience, and a spicy running monologue.

Mac himself is effervescent, skewering the nation’s history of minstrelsy and genocidal racism, homophobia and jingoism, with sardonic aplomb – “This is my subjective take on history,” he crows to the crowd, “I’m not so interested in history so much as we’ve all got a lot of history on our backs and we’re trying to figure out what to do with it.” In this case, he’s decided to create community with it, using “the queer body as a metaphor for America.” He turns homophobic numbers like Ted Nugent’s “Snakeskin Cowboy,” for example, into a “gay junior prom song.” One of Mac‘s greatest feats, captured well here, is his ability to completely dedicate his audience to the experience, orchestrating zany moments of queer magic: Strangers pass ping-pong balls back and forth with their mouths and slow dance close together, straight men perform a “no homo” ’50s samba routine on stage, the crowd shares cups of coffee from a makeshift Great Depression soup kitchen. 

The question, then, becomes one of translation to the screen: Given the vast amount of coverage the documentary team assembled, the temporal weight of Mac‘s endeavor should take center stage. Yet, somehow, co-directors Rob Epstein (The Times of Harvey Milk) and Jeffrey Friedman (Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice) who have two Oscars and a Grammy between them, don’t quite capture that frenzied sense of marathon duration. Perhaps it was a case of choice paralysis: For every song featured in the film, there were at least ten more, each with their own political resonances and theatrical flourishes. The filmmakers do create some beautiful visual moments, centrally in these passages of interaction between Mac and his audience: During his sequence on World War I, Mac invites anyone “over eighty-years-old” to volunteer to come onstage and teach “anyone under twenty-years-old” how to dance. The eventual pair, a dapper older gentleman and an amused young woman, do a swing routine that brings amazed cheers even from Mac.

In one particularly hallucinatory segment, two giant penis-shaped balloons sporting the Soviet and American flags respectively, bump tips in a spray of white confetti – “Here comes Gorbachev! Cold War reenactment!” But, again, it’s hard to mess up a piece of showmanship like that, so most of the credit stays with Mac. More kinetic filmmaking, perhaps, for example, shooting live interviews with audience members could have added a deeper level to the sense of communal creation at the heart of the project, but watching these scenes play out – even without the structure necessary to create the deeply felt emotional impact they surely had in the theater – is still a treat. 

Conclusion:

As the hours tick past, Mac maintains superhuman poise, makeup blurring as costumes change (from cork headdresses to pink Jackie O cloches to punk mohawks made of streamers) and supporting musicians depart, one every hour until he’s finally left alone with a ukulele for the final segment. Only then does the strain show as Mac‘s voice cracks for his final number. His performance is beautiful, and worth a watch for lovers of experimental theater, drag, and jukebox musicals. “Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music” was an incredible feat accomplished over 24 hours. It’s too bad the film still only feels like an hour and forty-five minutes. 

Watch Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music