‘Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music’ Review: Exhilarating Concert Doc Explores America Through a Queer Lens

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have been documenting queer history together since the late 1980s, the best known of their joint projects covering the AIDS crisis (Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt), LGBTQ screen representation (The Celluloid Closet) and gay persecution by the Nazi regime (Paragraph 175). So Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music is a fitting extension of their mission as filmmakers, venturing into the concert doc with a thrillingly unique event in which the haute drag performance artist takes a long hard look at the sins of America’s past in order to symbolically rebuild its present and future.

For anyone who has heard the ecstatic accounts of being in the 650-person audience at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn for the one-time-only marathon performance in 2016, this lovingly assembled record will be a next-best-thing gift. (It airs on HBO and Max from June 27 as part of the platform’s Pride month programming, along with Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, which drops the following day.) For those completely unfamiliar with Mac’s epic project, strap yourself in for a history lesson like no other.

Mac describes the show early on as “A Radical Faerie Realness Ritual… Sacrifice,” indicating that the event is the ritual and the audience is the sacrifice. The aim is for a collective experience in which everyone present, regardless of gender identity or sexuality, will move closer to their queerness and practice joy. The crowd is supplied with drag finery by Mac’s gaily clad Dandy Minions and instructed to participate in everything from a slo-mo Civil War re-enactment to the Trail of Tears, from intergenerational dance lessons to a revisionist performance of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado set on Mars — green being more acceptable than yellow face.

But if this sounds merely like an all-day serving of camp, don’t be fooled. From the opening moments, in which Epstein and Friedman show their consummate skill at hooking the viewer, it’s clear that beneath Mac’s rousing vocals and hilarious banter, there’s a profound original thinker at work. Not for nothing is the performer a Pulitzer finalist and a MacArthur Foundation grant recipient.

In the sole detour from the show’s chronological decade-by-decade magical history tour, spanning 1776 through 2016 to reconsider America through the songs of each period, the film opens roughly 19 hours into the performance. We’re at 1969, and Mac is dressed in a stained-glass-effect cape of peace signs, a spectacular headdress that looks like a hive of CDs and a bra fashioned like high-beam diamonds, delivering a ferocious take on The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”

Punctuating the song are thoughts on the defining moment of queer liberation, the Stonewall Riots, a mix of facts and apocrypha, culminating with drag activist Marsha P. Johnson reacting to the June 28 police raid by smashing a mirror, hurling “the shot glass heard around the world.”

Epstein, Friedman and lead editor Brian Johnson then hit us with a dazzling montage of Mac’s costumes, elaborate sartorial fantasias that introduce another genius, the longtime collaborator known as Machine Dazzle.

We see a whirl of pantomime garb, plumage, spangles and craft-project extravaganzas, cleverly incorporating thematic elements — a beer barrel and a headpiece of wine corks for a late-19th-century pub song; gay male erotica and flowers for a Walt Whitman tribute — and inventions of each decade, among them hot dogs, potato chip bags, 3-D glasses, cassettes, toilet paper and dynamite. Machine Dazzle describes the guiding principles behind his splendiferous, sculptural creations as “opulence, beauty, effeminism.” 

While Mac and music director Matt Ray had been touring the project as four six-hour shows, the Brooklyn gig was the first and only time it’s been seen in its entirety in a single sitting, making this generous sampling an invaluable record.

The show began as a response to the AIDS epidemic, honoring the way communities sprang up out of devastation. The performance begins with a stage jammed with musicians and backup singers, with one of them carried aloft in a glorious exit at the end of each hour. That concept is a direct echo of the losses of AIDS: “You fall in love, and then somebody’s gone,” says Mac.

It’s illustrated with poignant delicacy as vocalist Erin Hill, accompanying herself on a harp, performs the traditional folk song “10,000 Miles,” ushering in her departure. Throughout the show, the exits are unexpectedly moving, notably a mandolin player carried off to represent the more than 600,000 Civil War deaths, to a mournful rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

Transforming the songs in different styles and tempi, Mac and Ray aim to exhume deeper meaning from them, encouraging audiences to hear the lyrics with new clarity. That goes for patriotic ditties (“Yankee Doodle Dandy”), abolitionist songs (“The Ghost of Uncle Tom”) and sea shanties (“Coal Black Rose”), among many others. Accounts of rape, slavery, racism, genocide, war, homophobia and misogyny are parsed with biting wit and unsettling insights into the rot beneath the nation’s surface. But the tone is questioning, thoughtful, never lecturing.

One of the funniest sections is a smackdown for the title of Father of the American Song between “sentimentalist minstrel songwriter” Stephen Foster (hilariously represented by an audience volunteer) and “radical faerie poet” Whitman. Nobody is going to mind Mac’s obvious bias, hurtling almost maniacally through “Camptown Races” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” and stopping to point out that the offensive racial slur “darkies” was only changed in the official state song to “people” in the 1980s.  

Mac considers the sorrows of World War I by conducting just the audience members identifying as women in a singalong to “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” while the Dandies bandage the heads and limbs of men. This is then jarringly followed by a shower of balloons and the victory cheer of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” as if erasing the 16.5 million deaths of that conflict. “This song is like a person at a party trying to force their fun on you,” comments Mac, dryly.

Later, Mac reflects on America’s efforts to keep suburbia white, though nothing could stop queer kids from being born. This gives rise to the performer doing Springsteen’s “Born to Run” while dashing through the vast auditorium being pelted with ping pong balls. The follow-up is Ted Nugent’s “Snakeskin Cowboys,” an antigay song reinvented as a junior-prom romantic ballad. Explains Mac: “I read that lyric and thought, we’re gonna appropriate that shit!” There’s something ineffably beautiful about watching an entire audience divided into same-sex couples, slow-dancing to a song by a hate-mongering Trump supporter.

Epstein and Friedman lace the film with backstage glimpses and commentary from Mac, co-director Niegel Smith, Ray, Machine Dazzle and brilliant makeup artist Anastasia Durasova.

Mac’s personal history ranges from his entrée into New York theater, performing at raunchy gay clubs (“The Cock, The Slide and The Hole, in that order”) after being unable to land an audition out of acting school, to thoughts of the father who died when Mac was 4, remembered via what was apparently his favorite song, the “Soliloquy” from Carousel.

That notoriously difficult Rodgers and Hammerstein piece, tackled 16 hours into the performance, is a powerful consideration of one man’s thoughts on what makes an ideal son, switching midway to contemplate the arrival of a daughter instead. The number goes far beyond drag here, giving dramatic expression to the complexity of self-discovery and the conflict with parental expectation for many queer children.

As the last of the performers leave the stage — that honor goes to Ray, with an emotional embrace — Mac is left alone with just a ukulele, and for an epic show that scales such riotous heights, it seems fitting that it ends with a haunting slow fade to silence. Describing his objective at one point, Mac says, “I want to believe that an artist’s job is to dream the culture forward, to look at the things that aren’t working in society and think about how they could be better.”

Emerging from this extraordinary theatrical happening like a weary but still commanding oracle, Mac has shared a vision of America both personal and probing — tender, bruised and yet defiantly, magnificently hopeful. It’s simultaneously delirious and graced by what seems almost like ancient queer wisdom from somewhere way out there in the cosmos. Planet Fabulous. Epstein and Friedman perform a great service by extending its reach out into our own ailing world.