I BROUGHT YOU TARIFFS – A Parody | John Emory & Don Caron

A Parody of I Shot the Sheriff by Bob Marley with parody lyrics by John Emory and performance and video by Don Caron
Executive Producers for Parody Project Don Caron and Jerry Pender

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LYRICS for I Brought You Tariffs
John Emory

I brought you tariffs
To solve our trade inequity
I thought my tariffs
Were devoid of all complexity

If they won’t pay up it’s true
I’ll hold my breath ‘til I turn blue
Their goods will be more expensive now
So inflation maybe won’t come down
No, this won’t bring inflation down
But I say:

Let’s start the tariffs,
China, Canada, and Mexico
No justification
Can you guess where it is next we go?

Fiscal stuff always baffled me
So much I just don’t know
Every time I have a business fail
My insecurity just grows
I don’t know where the money goes
I say:

I thought my tariffs
Would give me so much influence
I thought that tariffs
Were a natural form of national defense

Experts know nothing, they say I’m wrong
They don’t know how to play the game
All they have to do is simply go along
Since I’ll always have the Fed to blame
I’ll target every one of ‘em by name
I say:

I brought you tariffs
Best thing since my corporate bankruptcy
I thought my tariff
Would be great fiscal policy

Nobody makes better deals than me
Believe what comes out of my mouth
I’m the one who says how things must be.
Until one day, it all goes South
Yeah, and one day it will all go South
So I say:

I brought you tariffs
To boost our sad economy
I brought you tariffs
The new fiscal lobotomy

ABOUT THE ORIGINAL SONG
The song was first released in 1973 on The Wailers’ album Burnin’. Marley explained his intention as follows: “I want to say ‘I shot the police’ but the government would have made a fuss so I said ‘I shot the sheriff’ instead… but it’s the same idea: justice.”

In 1992, with the controversy surrounding the Ice-T song “Cop Killer”, Marley’s song was often cited by Ice-T’s supporters as evidence of his detractors’ hypocrisy, considering that the older song was never similarly criticized despite having much the same theme.

In 2012, Marley’s former girlfriend Esther Anderson claimed that the lyrics, “Sheriff John Brown always hated me / For what, I don’t know / Every time I plant a seed / He said, ‘Kill it before it grow'” are actually about Marley being very opposed to her use of birth control pills; Marley supposedly replaced the word “doctor” with sheriff.