The Rough Guide to the Music of Jamaica is the rare volume in this wonderful series that tackles a country whose culture has spread through the world, and through the world's most popular performers. As such, it should shed light not only on Jamaican music, but on the series itself, and how "roughly" or succinctly these guides capture the spirit of a country's music.

Let's address the second question first. The producers make a great effort to find overlooked gems that, by definition, did not enter the collective conscience of Jamaican people. Popular artists are either overlooked or introduced through their earliest efforts (as with Dennis Brown's "Together Brothers"). Only one of these so-called gems fully earned its title -- Cornel Campbell's extremely affecting "I Shall Not Remove". This song is as rare as it is good, and its mere presence makes this purchase worthwhile.

As for Rough Guide's synopsis of Jamaican music, half of the twenty songs are devoted to little more than "fifties" music. It is very good doo-wop, to be sure, but it doesn't really distinguish itself from Stateside releases by Okeh or Sue from the same period. The disc's greatest statement seems to be in the smooth transition from Basil Gabbidon's fat, dominoed "Going Back to Ja" (1962) to the work of reggae and dancehall artists like Big Youth and Shabba Ranks. Judging from the tracks included here, the Rough Guide proposes that modern Jamaican acts remain closely tied to the roots music of their past. If this is true, it makes the island a soul brother to New Orleans. This, to me, is an extremely interesting proposition; however, it works in this context because the producers have chosen to ignore every recent modern Jamaican crossover hit, and selected the disc's Big Youth and Shabba Ranks tracks very, very carefully.

Overall, the Jamaica compilation suggests that the Rough Guide series does not serve to demonstrate a country's musical breadth, but simply to provide a batch of songs its producers love. This is not in any way an inferior objective, but the result for Jamaica is a bounty of enjoyable, intermittently excellent music that's a little too similar in style and expression to recommend to anyone who isn't building extensive reggae or doo-wop collections.