At the turn of the ’70s, reggae was the dominant sound of Jamaica and had made significant Windrush-generation inroads in the UK, but the rest of the world considered it something of a lighthearted novelty genre. Then Perry Henzell shot a modest-budget crime film starring singer Jimmy Cliff that depicted both the music and its outlaw cachet with such a vivid immediacy that its soundtrack became millions of listeners’ first reggae album. As a crash course in a genre that would feel truly international by the end of the decade, The Harder They Come is (at least retrospectively) almost as much a changing-of-the-guard landmark as it is a genre-catalyst, being released on a label that would lose its headline act the following year and signed Bob Marley and the Wailers as history-making compensation. But it’s also a practically-flawless record, gratuitous reprises and all, because it felt like the sort of hit-parade highlight reel that promised much, much more for people willing to indulge their curiosity over a previously niche genre. It’s remarkably effective as a small-yet-broad mass-market snapshot of a five-year musical evolution, from ska (given first-wave final-form greatness by the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop”) to rocksteady (Desmond Dekker’s “Dr. No”-inverting rude boy cool of “007 (Shanty Town)”) to roots reggae (The Melodians’ Rasta hymn “Rivers of Babylon”). A handful of Cliff’s classics are thrown in, not just to bolster his musical-cinematic star power, but to reinforce just how many paths he took to get there; the sorrowful gospel-soul alienation of “Many Rivers to Cross” and the bulletproof optimism of “You Can Get It If You Really Want” make for stunning counterparts, with the mournful yet confident “Sitting in Limbo” brilliantly splitting the difference. And then there’s Cliff’s death-before-subservience anthem of a title theme, which pulls off the rare paradoxical feat of sounding joyous in its cynicism.