2016: The Year the Music Died

I'm clearly not the only person noticing how ridiculously many high-profile celebrity deaths there have been this year. I remember surfing to the AV Club late one night, unable to sleep, and discovering that David Bowie had died - followed by the sick feeling as Alan Rickman passed away, followed by (among others) Garry Shandling, and now Prince.


It feels like even before Prince died I was joking (somewhat darkly) to myself that every visit to the AV Club portended another celebrity death. And I haven't done any RIP posts on Shandling or Prince because, in all honesty, I wasn't that familiar with their work. Both certainly influenced a lot of artists that I like, and finding out more about their work is something I'm looking forward to (heck, I'm even considering signing up to Tidal, because Prince's music isn't on YouTube or Spotify).

But my other thought about all these deaths is, are we really seeing more deaths than usual? I'm not about to do a meta-analysis of recent years, to determine whether we've really seen the highest number - there's a line even I won't cross.

And besides, what I'm questioning is whether or not we're only noticing this now because it's a certain cohort of entertainers who are disappearing. Bowie is most associated with the 70s, Prince with the 80s, and you could map Rickman and Shandling in a similar way. None of them was ridiculously old, but neither were they kids (although I concede that Prince's death at 57 or Phife Dawg's at 45 are particularly untimely).

I guess the point I'm making is, none of us is getting any younger, and the deaths we're used to are the ones that affect our parents (or grandparents). Our cohort of musicians, actors, writers, etc is generally older than we are, and bad things can happen at any time, so I suspect that this is just going to be the new normal. I think it would be more worrying if we were seeing younger cohorts all passing away suddenly at the same time - to give a particularly nerdy example, the original cast of Babylon 5, which aired in the 1990s, has effectively been decimated, while the original Star Trek's cast is mostly still around, even if they're much older.

Maybe this is all too morbid for a Friday night, but for all the unfortunate news about all these celebrity deaths, I think we need to settle in for it to continue. Just... if whoever's in charge of this could ease off for a few months, that would be great too.