I started reading Greil Marcus in the 1970s. He was a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone back then, when the magazine was published out of ramshackle San Francisco offices in what later became known as SoMa. As one of the first-gen rock critics, he had formidable competition from fellow contributors like Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, and Jon Landau. But Marcus stood out. His stuff was more learned, more concerned with placing rock in its cultural context. To my Rolling Stone–subscriber friends, his writing seemed kind of stuffed shirt, better suited to those deadly Norton anthologies of literature than to their beloved music rag.

But there was something new going on in his work, a strain of thought that connected him to serious critics in other disciplines. If Marcus was not quite in the same club car as Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, he was certainly riding on a parallel track. I’ll never forget the seismic shock I experienced reading his first book, Mystery Train (1975). It was the first time a writer had opened the aperture on rock and peered deeply into the genre’s historical context. That was no small thing in those days, when pop music criticism was fighting for respect among the mainstream intelligentsia. From the start, Marcus (who grew up on the Peninsula, attended Cal, and still lives in Berkeley) knew that this music was more than teenage kicks. When he listened to rock, he heard America singing.

Mystery Train was the first rigorous study of popular music written from the point of view of a perceptive fan. The book profiles six artists who he believes articulate the inherent contradictions in American culture: between freedom and servitude, tolerance and prejudice, opportunity and repression—in short, the disconnect between reality and certain enduring American myths. In Marcus’s view, Randy Newman’s songs “Sail Away” and “Political Science” lay bare these contradictions as well as any novel or film. Marcus was audacious enough to claim that rock artists can be on equal footing with other great creators, and persuasive enough to make the argument stick.

In 1989, he published Lipstick Traces, a book that’s been dog-eared and underlined by two generations of college students by now. Here, using the Sex Pistols as his starting point, he traces a history of misfit cultural revolution across epochs and continents. While his tweedy contemporaries frowned on punk rock as a worthy subject, Marcus saw the Sex Pistols as the latest manifestation of a strain of confrontational, subversive art that echoed back down the decades. He made explicit the link between the Pistols’ Johnny Rotten and Guy-Ernest Debord, a leader of the Situationist International art movement of the 1950s and ’60s, which saw cultural expression as a kind of bomb-throwing, anarchic act. It was all of a piece, but Marcus was the first writer to put all of the pieces together.

Lipstick Traces is a large and unruly book. In this way, it reflects the play of Marcus’s mind: ideas trail off, or bleed into one another, or bonk heads. For his critics, this is a major flaw in his work. But the thrill of reading Marcus at his best comes from that freewheeling thought, the sparks he sets off by having two disparate historical figures shake hands. He tears down the cul­tural ramparts in order to see the world whole: you’ve got to love how, in Lipstick Traces, he invokes Elizabeth Taylor and Karl Marx in the same paragraph.

Among his nine books are two on Bob Dylan (Invisible Republic, 1997, and Like a Rolling Stone, 2005), but he’s equally conversant with Dylan Thomas. And Marcus long ago expanded his purview. In his latest, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, he demonstrates how historically significant oratory helped construct America’s self-image. In a dazzling rhetorical display of his own, Marcus links Puritan colonialist John Winthrop’s famous “City on a Hill” speech to Ronald Reagan’s pie-eyed worldview, and Lincoln’s second inaugural address (“With Malice towards none; with Charity for all”) to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 civil rights rally in Washington, D.C.

“It feels like a miracle,” Marcus writes, “this explosion of rhetoric, these flying words, but the pain they now carry is not what propelled them through the air the day King gave them flight. The pain is that the great nation King prophesied so long ago no more exists today than it did then.” So The Shape of Things to Come is about the broken covenant between America’s citizenry and its ideals. It’s the same theme that drove Mystery Train, but Marcus is digging even deeper and hitting some hard, bleak truths.

Of course, trawling in the culverts on the dark side of American life, he’s found a lot of weirdness. He discovered that other, weird America in the gothic folk and blues of the early 20th century, for instance, writing (in Invisible Republic) about the death wail of 1920s banjo player Dock Boggs and the music of blues singer Frank Hutchison, who recorded an early version of the murder ballad “Stackalee” in 1927. More recently, in The Rose and the Briar (2005), an anthology of essays on the American ballad that he co-edited, Marcus reveals a world where children are wantonly murdered and ghosts walk among men.

In his new book, he feels that tectonic rumble in the work of David Lynch, the poète maudit of small-town life. “Lynch’s great subject,” Marcus writes, “is instability and displacement: What happens when the ground disappears from beneath your feet, when you find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Here he makes a characteristic leap of faith, taking one of the most reviled films of the ’90s—Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the ill-advised prequel to the deeply strange and gripping David Lynch–Mark Frost TV series Twin Peaks—and convincing the reader that it’s an apposite examination of the darkness-and-light dialectic in contemporary American life, with the ugliness existing right beneath the chromium veneer.

Typically, the book is all over the place. Marcus touches down on three later Philip Roth novels—American Pas­toral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain—to show how those novels map the fraying of the social compact into an “American berserk.” Then he holds forth on actor Bill Pullman, of all things. “Bill Pullman’s face is pushed down by a weight he’s sud­denly realized he’s carrying,” Marcus writes of Pullman’s performance in Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). “But what you are seeing is pure pressure, the weight coming down, the muscles in his face straining to hold it up.” Pullman is supposed to stand in here for some barely constrained madness in American life. It’s a nutty theory, to be sure, but Marcus can pull off these high-wire acts by the sheer force of his passionate prose.

The Shape of Things to Come is, like the rest of his work, illuminating and maddening and exuberant, in equal measure. Greil Marcus remains a perceptive cultural diviner and a true believer in the power of art to tell us crucial stories about ourselves. Forty years after his first byline, it’s important to keep paying attention to what he has to say.