Greil Marcus is that rarest of specimens: a pop-culture critic whose prose won’t make a smarter-than-average music fan turn away, utterly confused, and crank Sabbath’s Master of Reality at ear-splitting decibels.

While Marcus’s best-known work has dealt primarily with rock, his forthcoming The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice is more ambitious in scope, examining what makes America fundamentally unique: the legacy of promises on which our nation is founded, and the various forms of discourse that have arisen around the betrayal of same.

Marcus starts his analysis with political and religious figures: Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But by the time the 1960s roll around, the playing field has shifted; artists are the last public figures questioning what it means to be American.

Sounds heady, yes? Yet Marcus connects the dots between a 1670 sermon delivered by Reverend Samuel Danforth, Twin Peaks, and the riot grrrl movement with refreshing fluidity. “All criticism is, I think, is bringing the terms of one thing to bear on another, practicing juxtaposition like dowsing,” says Marcus via e-mail.

“The challenge was to bring a reader into a story told by people, or in work, that he or she might never have encountered, or heard of. In other words, if it works, this book is not ‘for fans of’ Philip Roth or [Pere Ubu’s] David Thomas or Corin Tucker or David Lynch. Ideally, it’s for people who don’t care about them at all, but who might.”

Bumbershoot offers several opportunities to enjoy the sort of artists Marcus discusses—“someone who calls a community to judgment, to judge itself, or who in some unique way embodies that judgment.” He cites author Mary Gaitskill, S.F. band Erase Errata, and cartoonist Charles Burns among them.

But Marcus’s favorite? You’ll find her all three days: Mary Lynn Rajskub, whom he singles out for her portrayal of Chloe O’Brian on the TV drama 24, “For the sense of a secret life she carries, for her determination, her mad single-mindedness… really, for her scowl. ‘You’re all fucked,’ she seems to be saying. ‘Say your prayers, for all the good that’ll do you.’”