I was out biking yesterday and a car rolled by blasting a song that sounded a lot like Kate Bush. I considered tweeting about it, but then stopped myself — thinking, no one will believe a person was cruising around south Minneapolis blasting Kate Bush. And yet, if I said I have a friend who's throwing a Kate Bush themed costume party, that would seem entirely plausible. She has a small, but fervent, following.

To my initial surprise, Kate Bush doesn't appear in Robert Dimery's new book Cult Musicians: 50 Progressive Performers You Need to Know (buy now). The reason why is that Dimery is from the U.K., where Bush has enjoyed more chart hits than an American fan might expect. The whole country is in her cult.

It would be easy to get caught up in the question of what, exactly, defines a "cult musician." You could say it's an artist whose fans are few but incredibly devoted — like the eclectic French art pop singer Brigitte Fontaine. You could say it's an artist whose influence is far greater than their name recognition — like hip-hop producer J Dilla. You could say it's any critical darling, like Patti Smith.

Ultimately, Dimery writes in an introduction, he settled on artists whose "public recognition has come without artistic compromise." As I paged through Cult Musicians, what I found myself thinking again and again that these are not just artists for the full album experience, they're artists you can't fully get without listening to their complete oeuvre. The Beatles certainly have a cult, but they also have a lot of causal fans; every song is designed to be a self-contained experience. You can't really say the same about Yoko Ono, who's included here.

My surprise at Kate Bush's omission aside, Dimery does include most of the usual suspects. Frank Zappa was a gimme, as was Captain Beefheart. One of the book's gratifying takeaways, though, is that there are cult musicians in all genres. In jazz there's Sun Ra; in country there's Bobbie Gentry; in reggae there's Lee "Scratch" Perry.

Another common thread is that cult musicians tend to either have small, venerated catalogs (Nick Drake) or sprawling catalogs that you'd have to be a cult member to know all of (Fela Kuti). By Dimery's definition, Prince would be a worthy member of this canon: once he engineered his independence, he released so much music that this estate has spent the past four years just getting his albums in order, let alone material from the overflowing Vault.

The book is structured as its subtitle implies: brief entries, presented in alphabetical order, with striking portraits by Kristelle Rodeia that illuminate what makes each artist distinctive. Sandy Denny, for example (the British folksinger known for her membership in the Fairport Convention), lies alone on a beach. Serge Gainsbourg sits in an armchair holding a lowball and waving a Gauloises. Polly Jean Harvey stands serene in a white dress before a murder of crows.

Even the most avid music fan will make some new discoveries in these pages; as the author of 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, Dimery has knowledge that goes deep. Artists I apparently need to know, but didn't, include funk rocker Betty Davis, Love leader Arthur Lee, and the Walker Brothers' breakout eccentric Scott Walker.

Other artists are well-known, but for only a corner of their output. Case in point: Marianne Faithfull, indelibly associated with her teenage hit "When Tears Go By" even though she went on to become a master interpreter of Kurt Weill. You might know Peaches's "F--k the Pain Away," but did you know she had an acclaimed 2010 stage show accompanied only by a single pianist?

In concise biographies, Dimery celebrates these artists' defiance. Björk could have kept making "Human Behaviour" and perhaps become a mainstream pop star, but instead she built a strange and majestic body of work drawing on the full range of her many talents. The Slits were even worse at their instruments than the Sex Pistols, and being women, it took even more guts to storm out into the world that way. Moondog, possibly the quintessential cult artist, busked bizarrely on a corner near Carnegie Hall until major musicians started lending their ears.

Prince isn't here, nor is Bob Dylan, nor are the Replacements — but Alex Chilton, who may be best-known for their song about him, is. So is Minnesota's own Kat Bjelland, who Dimery credits as being the "original riot grrrl." Through the sheer power of her performance — and through a musicality balanced by her less-experienced bandmates — Bjelland inspired an entire generation of alt rockers. Her cult, thankfully, is still growing.

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Upcoming Rock and Roll Book Club picks

Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Wednesday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. Also, find Jay's reviews online.

June 17: Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack (buy now)

June 24: Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary by Sasha Geffen (buy now)

July 1: America the Band: An Authorized Biography by Jude Warne (buy now)

July 8: Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (buy now)