I Shot the Sheriff

Bob Marley wrote "I Shot the Sheriff" with a careful eye on the authorities. He explained that he wanted to sing "I shot the police" but feared the government would object, so he substituted a sheriff instead, adding that the meaning was the same idea: justice. The song appeared in 1973 on the Wailers' album Burnin', released by the Jamaican band fronted by Marley alongside Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, who had founded the group in 1963.

The lyrics drew an unusual interpretation decades later. In 2012, Marley's former girlfriend Esther Anderson claimed that the lines about Sheriff John Brown, who hated the narrator and wanted to kill every seed he planted, were actually about Marley's opposition to her use of birth control pills. According to Anderson, Marley had replaced the word "doctor" with "sheriff" in the text.

The song also resurfaced during a later controversy. In 1992, when Ice-T faced backlash over his track "Cop Killer", supporters pointed to Marley's song as evidence of hypocrisy, noting that it dealt with much the same theme yet had never drawn similar criticism. By that time Marley had been dead for over a decade, having died from cancer in 1981, after which the Wailers disbanded.