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How many rivers do we have to cross
Before we can talk to the boss
All that we got seems lost
We must have really paid the cost
(That's why we gonna be)
Burnin' and a-lootin' tonight
(Say we gonna burn and loot)
Burnin' and a-lootin' tonight
(One more thing)
Burnin all pollution tonight
(Oh yeah, yeah)
Burning all illusions tonight
Oh stop them
Give me the food and let me grow
Let the roots man take a blow
All them drugs gonna make you slow now
It's not the music of the ghetto
Weeping and a-wailing tonight
(Ooh can't stop the tears)
Weepin' and a-wailin' tonight
(We've been suffering all these long, long years)
Weeping and a-wailing tonight
Give me the food and let me grow
Let the roots man take a blow
All them drugs gonna make you slow now
It's not the music of the ghetto
We gonna be burnin' and a-lootin' tonight
(To survive, yeah)
Burnin' and a-lootin' tonight
(Save your babies lives)
Burning all pollution tonight
Burning all illusions tonight
Burnin and lootin tonight
Burnin and lootin tonight
Album liner notes: "How long before we can be seen as just human beings?" The night before there had been a curfew: the youth, who would throw molotov cocktails at the police, had been burning and stealing. Bob and Rita woke in their Second Street tenement apartment and found rifles pointed at them through their windows, the police "all dressed in uniforms of brutality". Everyone - the entire ghetto - is surrounded. For four days they can't even go to the shops. Bob was seen as a community leader; and the police would come and ask him which youth had taken the car of the stolen goods. "We were all calculated as hoodlums, even before the Rasta thing came into being," says Rita. "But they were depending on Bob to be a good-good Rudie. We lived before the cemetery. By seven or eight in the morning everybody's out on the sidewalk, Bob playing his guitar, a football match gets started. Because Bob was lightskin, it not so bad fe we. Jamaica very colour prejudiced."