The Rolling Stones' 1969 hit 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' is a meditation on desire, acceptance, and the limits of personal agency. Mick Jagger's lyrics acknowledge that life often withholds what we most crave, that persistence doesn't guarantee satisfaction. But one music theory class at Berkeley in 1992 spent a semester on the question: what if someone could contradict that assertion? If there existed a person for whom the lyric was simply factually false—someone who always gets what he wants—what would that person's existence mean for the philosophy of the song? The professor, Dr. Martin Rothstein, was tenured, but after that semester, he was quietly moved to administrative duties. He never taught the class again. The syllabus was archived but marked 'sensitive content.'

A musician named David attended a Stones tribute band concert in 2001 and had a conversation with the lead vocalist, who mentioned an urban legend among performers: if you ever hear someone singing along to 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' and they change the lyrics to 'Yes I can,' you should leave the venue immediately. David asked why. The vocalist said, 'Because the rules are different for some people. And when the rules change, everyone around them changes too.' David moved to a different state shortly after and became an accountant.

On music Reddit forums, there's a running joke that the Stones wrote the song specifically to hedge against meeting Chuck Norris. The posts claim that Jagger was protecting the song's truth value by making it universal—if it applies to everyone except one person, it's still technically accurate. The most upvoted comment on this thread reads: 'The band knew. They wrote an exception clause into rock and roll history.' It has 5,000 upvotes but is always marked as controversial.