“Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me” is a Masterpiece of Modern Songwriting
On August 6, 2026, this author published an article titled “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic: Bigger & Weirder 2026 Tour.” At that concert, there was one particular song that was new to both me and my spouse. That song was “Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me.” As we listened to the lyrics, we felt that it embodied everything wrong with modern email systems. Even through the song was released in 2011 as the last song on the “Alpocalypse” album, it maintains its relevance today. This says a lot about the lack of reform in email systems, both by the users and the systems themselves.
The song starts with a sound similar to that of a charity single. The lyrics opine that life is too short and that one needs to cherish every moment of every day. However, it quickly take a turn with the lyrics: “But if time is so precious, why you wasting mine? / Because I’m always reading, always deleting / Every useless piece of garbage that you send my way.”
The song continues to expound on all of the ways that someone (everyone?) is wasting his time by sending him all manner of junk email. The next verses decry all kinds of mild spam: corny jokes, messages sent to “brighten my day,” cringe-inducing puns, and crappy Hallmark poetry. However, things quickly escalate in the next verse, as “Weird Al” complains that people are sending “virus-laden, bandwidth-hogging attachments / to every single person you know,” as well as “passing around a link to some dumb thing on YouTube / that everybody else already saw three years ago.”
Things go from bad to worse as he condemns emails containing urban legends and “I have high hopes that someone will point you towards Snopes.” Snopes is, of course, the conspiracy-busting website that’s been around since 1994. In the song, he points out a number of conspiracy theories and urban legends that still haven’t died in spam emails. The hoxes include thinking that Mr. Rogers fought in Vietnam. This particular one was debunked in the 2018 documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
However, the extensive list of poor email practices does not stop there. Al continues to condemn emails offering “a bowl of Chicken Soup for the Soul,” top ten lists that might cause him to “slash [his] wrists,” and the sender’s paranoid rants that he can’t stand any longer. Moreover, he wonders in what universe he would ever want emails containing “glittery hearts and unicorns and pictures of somebody’s cat.” He also makes it clear not to send him petitions to sign, or emails containing a threat that “some dead girl is going to kill me / if I don’t pass your letter along.” Finally, in possibly the worst violation of all, he states that “your two million loser friends all have my address now / Because you never figured out the way to BCC.”
I think this song resonates 15 years later with everyone because we have all been on the receiving end of some, if not all, of these types of emails and things really have not changed in 15 years. The American CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 forced commercial entities to be slightly better behaved in their email practices, but it did nothing for one’s crazy relatives and friends sending them junk email on a regular basis!
