"Trick or treat niggaz wit hoods want the goods
I feel like Robin Hood when I share it wit my hood"
-- Malice, Clipse, "Chinese New Year", Hell Hath No Fury

"Been wishing my life away
For Robin Hood to be King
One day
We'll share
The treasures of the world
Oh yeah,
And I will get the girl"
--Green Gartside, Scritti Politti, "Robin Hood", White Bread Black Beer

Now that's quite odd--two references to Robin Hood in albums that made my personal top 10 of 2006.

"Robin Hood" has signified something to Green since the earliest days of Scritti. In one of the first interviews the group did he referred to The Clash as an initital catalyst/inspiration that was rapidly renounced/denounced, alluding specifically to the Westway boys conception of themselves as rockin' Robin Hoods, a sort of guitar-toting Magnificent Seven coming into town to set everything to rights. Which notion of Green's surely partly triggered by the lyric in "White Man In Hammersmith Palais":

"White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution?"

There's an EMP abstract, if not actual talk, to be spun out of this I'm sure....