That in turn is why Kevin Spacey’s mission to revive Bobby Darin from obscurity feels so quixotic. In the liner notes to Beyond the Sea: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Atco/Rhino), Spacey claims that, aside from Sammy Davis Jr., Darin was "the greatest nightclub entertainer we ever had," forgotten only because of his death 1973, at age 37, from heart failure. For all I know, he may be right. As the Beyond the Sea soundtrack proves too well, performing and recording are distinct skills. Spacey’s singing and dancing in the film — enhanced by Technicolor glow and period-piece glamor — go above and beyond the call of duty. But on the soundtrack’s intelligently selected re-creations (superbly produced by Phil Ramone, who co-produced Stewart’s first two Songbook volumes), Spacey’s careful training can be heard for what it is: the most intelligent karaoke performance of all time.

It’s a more fitting tribute than Spacey may have intended. His imitation makes you itch to get at Darin’s original genius, but Rhino’s 2002 Hit Singles Collection reveals that Darin himself was playing at karaoke by mimicking big bands, Elvis, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and folk music as they struck his eager fancy. Unlike Spacey, Darin was a born musician, but he was also born on the wrong side of the rock divide to be able to compete for Sinatra’s crown. "Mack the Knife" is a classic, and several other performances are almost as fine, but none of them transcends early trifles like the hallucinogenic Darin-penned Jerry Lee Lewis ripoff "Splish Splash" and the bouncing, opportunistic amalgam "Queen of the Hop," because these novelties belong to that moment in 20th-century popular music when rock and roll exploded as a common street language almost any non-square could speak. The price was, those who picked it up were imprinted with its vulgar accent forever.

That includes Nellie McKay, and that’s the key to her debut’s excitement — its spiraling play between edgy rock attitude and plush pre-rock comfort. On the one hand, her cabaret craft as writer and performer is part and parcel of her debut’s satirical skewering of decorous privilege. It starts with Get Away from Me’s title, a play on Norah Jones’s Starbucks-ready smash Come Away with Me, and it includes skewering herself as a neurotic Type-A artist as anxious about her place in the world as any sensitive college freshman who’s discovered Noam Chomsky. On the other hand, the album’s panoply of richly textured styles is McKay’s own act of karaoke devotion, a tip to her influences, and it’s clear she loves nothing so much as old pop. To judge from our harried interview, that’s partly because new pop is radically different in a way that triggers a deep antipathy. "I got into Jerry Lee Lewis before Doris Day, and that’s interesting that you’d say that one was a reaction to the other, because for me, listening to her was certainly a reaction to listening to him."

In short, she discovered Jerry Lee Lewis was a brutal bastard, and so she shrank from everything he represented, including the leering sexuality that he and every other rocker brought to the fore with unprecedented force. "You know, I’ll go to a protest, but I’m going to wear a suit. In some ways, it really bothers me to read my press, because I’ll talk to someone like you in a totally different voice than I’d talk to somebody like my Auntie Chrissie. And if I talk to my Auntie Chrissie, I just want to be a nice, clean, upstanding young lady."

As Frank Sinatra knew, rock and roll was not for nice, clean, upstanding young ladies. "Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth." That famous quote is included in the gorgeous CD booklet to Caetano Veloso’s A Foreign Sound (Nonesuch), as are a dozen more provocative, contradictory statements about various aspects of American pop. But the CD disturbs by laying out the styles as if they were all the same. Slipping softly from fully orchestrated renditions of Irving Berlin and David Byrne to stripped-bare versions of Cole Porter and Kurt Cobain, the 62-year-old singer deconstructs the songs just by loving every one of them tender (including "Love Me Tender"). It doesn’t all work, but maybe Veloso didn’t expect it to, risking not only an Arto Lindsay art-noise blowout with full orchestra but also the dread "Feelings." The reason for some of these choices is just personal ("Feelings" was, after all, composed by a Brazilian, Morris Albert), but the emotional revelations that he gets are as thick as the music is delicate. Stewart and Darin are stuck in their age, and McKay makes the most of playing off differences, but Veloso floats free like the international bohemian he is. No matter what historical ages come and go, black sweaters are always in.