From David Bowie and Prince to Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, people have lamented the many celebrity deaths in 2016. And brace yourself for more of the same in 2017.
Fans publicly grieved and wrote messages on Twitter and Facebook about how 2016 seemed unnaturally cruel. The British Broadcasting Corp.’s obituaries editor Nick Serpell said there were twice as many obituaries for public figures in 2016 than in the previous year and five times as many as in 2012.
While there’s no real scientific way to determine who is really a celebrity — particularly in the age of social media and reality TV — Serpell also said there was a spike in obituaries at the start and at the end of 2016. There’s a bigger audience for these obituaries, too. Nearly 10 years after the first iPhone was launched, there are more ways to receive the news about the death of a public figure and share it.
Even if 2016 was not jinxed, some argue that the same number or more celebrities — from A- to Z-list — will die in 2017. At least, judging by the articles and tributes online. Why? There are so many ways for people to become famous and many baby boomers who came of age during the post-war explosion of popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s are simply going to get sick and die.
In fact, the death rate in the US rose in 2015 for the first time in a decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, partly due to the increase in deaths among baby boomers (as well as opiate addiction, suicide, and Alzheimer’s disease).
“To put it in its crudest, simplest terms: There are just more famous people around and more of them are going to die,” says Ellis Cashmore, visiting professor of sociology at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, and author of “Celebrity Culture.” This, he says, will be the start of the new normal. “We can expect to see a large number of celebrity deaths for the near future,” he says.
“It definitely felt like a reaping,” Aram Sinnreich, associate professor at American University in Washington, DC, says of 2016. But when you calculate only A-list celebrities who died in 2016, strictly speaking, it wasn’t a record-setting year.
Here is one calculation that attempted to put the myth to rest that 2016 was killing famous people: CNN looked at the end of the line for stars from Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, Grammy Award winners (excluding technical awards), Sports Illustrated magazine’s sportsman or sportswoman of the year, Emmy and Academy Award nominees in the acting categories for comedy and drama. It did find there were 34 deaths, more than double the previous year, but there were 36 in 2006, a year when there was not the same keening on social media. (Hardly a surprise: Facebook had just 12 million users that year versus 1.79 billion today.)
The online publishing industry has benefited from people sharing news of the most shocking deaths: Each boldface death leads to millions of people clicking on stories and status updates online. The names of many of those deceased public figures — George Michael, Nancy Reagan, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Muhammad Ali among them — were trending on Facebook and Twitter. No surprise, then, that US publishers are doubling down on obituaries (famous and not) as a source of revenue, with some newspapers increasing revenue from obituaries by up to 40 percent.
Some people saw the funny side: A fan of actress Betty White, 94, even launched a GoFundMe campaign to “Help protect Betty White from 2016.” People wondered what they had ever done to deserve this and they worried (not always ironically) who would be the next famous face to suffer at the hands of 2016. A comedian even tweeted about the former president of Cuba, “Fidel Castro survived 638 assassination attempts, but even he could not survive 2016.”
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But is it frivolous for social media users (and journalists) to spend so much time writing about dead celebrities when an estimated half-million people died in the civil war in Syria? “To say that celebrity is frivolous is a bit short-sighted when we just elected a celebrity to lead the country,” Sinnreich says.
“Our association with [Donald] Trump is from the 1980s, when he published ‘The Art of the Deal,’” he adds. “To most Americans he is the guy from ‘The Celebrity Apprentice.’ It’s unlikely that he would have been the nominee, let alone the winner, had it not been for his status as the host of a reality TV show.” (Hillary Clinton parlayed her own fame as a public servant into a lucrative speech circuit on Wall Street, which came back to haunt her during her campaign for president.)
The presidential election also rattled people, Sinnreich adds, and their public grieving was probably as much because the bitter campaigning exacerbated and highlighted just how much the country is divided politically and, perhaps, culturally. “Many people feel this collective sense of loss like an era is ending and a new one is beginning,” he says. (It should be noted that this theory is not likely to apply to those who voted for Trump over Clinton.)
“Celebrities matter because they encapsulate our values,” Sinnreich says, which is why they make such successful product promoters and why people follow their personal lives on Twitter and Instagram. If you tell someone you are a fan of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Alec Baldwin, Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you likely won’t have to get into long and complex conversations about who you are and what you believe, Sinnreich adds.
“We don’t have a new David Bowie, Prince or Carrie Fisher,” he says. Each one was a trailblazer in his or her own way, Sinnreich says. “It’s not just about losing these individuals. It’s about coming to grips with the fact that we haven’t replaced them.”
The most recent high-profile deaths of baby boomers (who were mourned by other baby boomers) may pale in comparison to stars who came of age in the social media age. “The definition of celebrity has changed,” says Ari Zoldan, CEO of technology and media company Quantum Networks in New York. “Today’s celebrities can interact directly with fans and build these connections. Before social media, that was something they were never able to do.”
And younger stars seem more tuned in than those who recently departed. Singer-actress Selena Gomez became the first star last year to gain 100 million followers on Instagram (she now has 106 million). Beyoncé has 91 million and Arianna Grande has 93 million. David Bowie’s official Instagram account has 628,000 followers, Prince’s account has 491,000 and Carrie Fisher’s Instagram has 133,000.
Cashmore is less forgiving: “It’s almost as if a new kind of narcissism has taken over a complete generation.” He points to people’s obsession with taking selfies, which he says young people learn from today’s crop of reality TV and pop stars.
And what happened to that GoFundMe campaign for Betty White? It almost reached its target of $10,000. There are perhaps few celebrities who are as beloved and apolitical as White. She is an animal rights champion and a fixture on our screens since the advent of television (long before either “Mary Tyler Moore” or “The Golden Girls”). She is also the oldest person ever to host “Saturday Night Live” and has 1.35 million Twitter followers.
Since she survived 2016, Demetrios Hrysikos from Spartanburg, SC, who started the GoFundMe campaign, said he will donate all money raised ($9,245) to the Spartanburg Little Theatre “to help craft new stars of stage and screen to carry the mantle of the legends that have left us this past year.”
One upside to A- to Z-listers who may die in 2017: “Social media keeps celebrities’ brands and their life’s work alive,” Zoldan adds. “That was not possible even two decades ago.”