- Celebrity is lumpy. Bowie, Prince and Cohen were big lumps.

- The lumps are distributed unevenly. Baby boomers are dying around now, and they created their own culture.

- Celebrity itself only became big roughly (very roughly) as these people came of age and did their great works.

I read someplace that the phenomenon of modern celebrities and the communication networks / styles necessary to develop those celebrities started to take off at a time that coincides with those ever-increasing numbers of celebrities to reach their terminal years now. Unfortunately I cannot find the original source, but perhaps somebody else knows what it was.

I think there were a few celebrity deaths that were really unexpected, especially Prince (who died of an accidental drug overdose) and David Bowie (who hadn't revealed he had cancer and outwardly seemed to be healthy and active), so they hit people especially hard.

And those came on top of the incredibly bitter political situation in the U.S., the Brexit vote and refugee-related strife in the E.U., rising authoritarianism in Russia and China, and a number of high-profile terrorist attacks and some serious natural disasters.

Maybe related to a special post war period that gave birth to icons so many of us shared through the rised of nascent mainstream mass scale medias.

More than a dreadful year, it's also the passing of a generation, of a world. Sometimes I think that we had it too easy and we produced nothing good as a replacement for being somehow spoiled brats.

I was wondering myself. For what it's worth, no one thought to make the equivalent of /r/fuck2016 for any other year.