It’s obvious once you see it. He’s known her a long time and loves her, but she’s shying away. He’s leaving in a day or two for college, the Army, a job in another city, whatever, so it’s now or never. “You’re all the things I’ve got to remember” He’ll think of her every day after he’s gone. “Say after me: It’s no better to be safe than sorry” If we leave this undone, we’ll regret that, and we’ll regret it even more than we’d regret having a two-day romance where one or both of us gets hurt. Protecting ourselves from that hurt, but...

It’s obvious once you see it. He’s known her a long time and loves her, but she’s shying away. He’s leaving in a day or two for college, the Army, a job in another city, whatever, so it’s now or never. “You’re all the things I’ve got to remember” He’ll think of her every day after he’s gone. “Say after me: It’s no better to be safe than sorry” If we leave this undone, we’ll regret that, and we’ll regret it even more than we’d regret having a two-day romance where one or both of us gets hurt. Protecting ourselves from that hurt, but missing out on those two days, isn’t better than just taking it all on and seeing what happens.

Although clothed in imagery of the American Old West, and ostensibly a tale of police corruption and an ontological legal argument for the protagonist's self-defense and the 5th amendment to the Bill of Rights, this simplistic explanation misses the fact that Jamaica is not governed under the United States Constitution, and fails to take into account certain events involving Bob "Jacob" Marley when Island Records met with Hpignosis to commission the album cover artwork and layout of several new releases, including the Wailers' own upcoming "Churnin'".

Although clothed in imagery of the American Old West, and ostensibly a tale of police corruption and an ontological legal argument for the protagonist's self-defense and the 5th amendment to the Bill of Rights, this simplistic explanation misses the fact that Jamaica is not governed under the United States Constitution, and fails to take into account certain events involving Bob "Jacob" Marley when Island Records met with Hpignosis to commission the album cover artwork and layout of several new releases, including the Wailers' own upcoming "Churnin'".

The fact is, the song was only written after Marley met with the graphic designers and left horrified by what he called a criminal rewriting of history, when it was divulged that it was the marketing division that directed the imagery, and whose the primary directive it was to "update" the Wailers' own cowboy image using contemporary typesetting of the album cover, featuring a young Melissa Gilbert dressed in a bonnet and churning a tub of butter behind her family's Prairie Schooner.

Marley, Peter "Mac SE" Tosh and "House" Bunny Wailer immediately noted that the typeface was inauthentic to that used on Wanted posters, vintage Sears Robuck catalogs, and personal ads from the 1880s through the turn of the 20th century, and saw it as an attempt at subterfuge of their artistic merit and credibility. So incensed were they, that they took the proofs and set them aflame, yelling "no rewriting history to make a shilling!"

The incident led to the group's re-titling the album burnin' and the composition of the song "I Shot the Sheriff", which was rush-recorded in the Rolling Stones' mobile recording truck (which Keith Richards had driven out to Jamaica after receiving a call from Marley).

The resulting track was an impressionist commentary on the Helvetica font as a symbol of mid-century American capitalist imperialism, where modernity and a false romantization of scientific "progress" were used to fool and woo the public into feeling that unbounded industrialization and the resulting pollution, environmental damage, loss of wildlife habitat, and waste of global resources were necessary and even harmless, compared to the benefits.

As such, the symbol of the corrupt "sheriff" is a thinly veiled metaphor for the "serif" used in typefaces before the military industrial and corporate industrialist new world order coup introduced the Helvetics font and engineered a public relations campaign to deprecate the serif from fonts worldwide, and fixed-width fonts, and render all existing media as arcane and false in the eyes of the public, and equate environmentalists with Luddites and anti-vaxxers.

Marley sings "I shot the serif!" although unknown to the band, during the record's mastering process, the CIA intervened and had the recording engineers overdub a "sh" over the line in the song, to mask the intended meaning. When Marley heard the finished mastered recording, and was told that the "sh" was a malfunctioning "de-esser" effect in the studio, and it would be impossible to correct, as the tapes had already gone to the pressing plant, he became despondent, and lit up a joint, which the CIA photographed, and unbeknownst to him would be used for the album cover.

The record label agreed to the change in the album title, but rather than using the band's chosen album cover picturing the members setting alight and "burnin'" pages in Helvetica font, a picture of Marley smoking reefer was substituted, forever altering the public's perception of the album as an endorsement of revreational drug use, which would invariably damage the group's credibility with the straight-laced government administrators, and encourage their would-be audience to light up, so they would be too stoned to care.

As if this wasn't enough, the establishment's masterstroke was to airlift an acetate of the Wailers' new song to Eric Clapton, and persuade him to record a version in order to revive his flagging career. When Clapton, a known Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and spaghetti western fan, released the song, it became an instant hit, forever altering its meaning from an anti-imperialist and psy-ops anthem, to a simple song about wanton criminality, and setting the stage for disco (but that's a whole other story).