Like many of you, I dragged myself to work last Friday with my head held low.
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I blasted I Would Die 4 U as loud as I could without distracting fellow commuters. I had a moment of silence with my co-workers over the untimely passing of the Purple One.
Finally, a thought popped into my head, one which had seemingly been frequent recently: why do all our heroes, the artists who touch so many lives with their passion and empathy, keep dying?
This year has been a dark one for celebrity deaths already. Prince, Bowie, Merle Haggard, the "fifth Beatle" George Martin, the guy who played Admiral Ackbar in Star Wars; too many legends have passed.
So why is the Grim Reaper, as some have pointed out, trading in his scythe for a lawnmower? Why is the universe ruining our days, one depressing newspaper front page at a time?
Well, as it turns out, there's a few factors at play here.
Firstly, there's simply the fact that the stars who came to the fore in the 60's and 70's are now reaching their golden days. While Prince himself was fairly young at 57, Bowie was reaching the curve at 69, and Merle Haggard was 79.
The reason it seems the biggest stars of the 20th century are all dying at once is because, in a manner of speaking, they are.
These celebrities made names for themselves in the vibrantly healthy post-war creative boom, when moral and cultural values rapidly changed and expanded with the birth of counterculture following World War II.
Bowie, especially, was eulogized as one of the biggest names in the avant-garde scene of 60's Britain; Eagles' Glenn Frey produced some of the more important American rock music of the century.
There's also the pretty believable notion that celebrity culture really hit its top speed from the 1960's on.
So the Baby Boomers who helped guide cultural change through the halcyon days of the latter half of the 20th century are sadly now reaching their use-by-date.
But that hasn't stopped the idea of some kind of mass life-exodus on the part of celebrities being bandied around social media and through gossip. This reached it's viral zenith when the BBC asked their obituary editor to look into things.
Nick Serpell prepares the BBC's obits across all platforms, so would have a pretty good knowledge of the average bucket-kicking quota.
And yes, according to his research, 2016 has so far been a little different from previous years.
The BBC's research, admittedly into their own publications, shows sharp jumps in reported deaths this year, especially in terms of celebrities.
Servell and the BBC more or less reach the same conclusion: television and counterculture really pushed celebrity status from 1960s, and cemented the idea of celebrity. Those celebrities are now dying out, marking the end of what we could see as the first generation of worldwide celebrities.
But even in the last 10 years, that idea has changed again. Many of those who have recently passed were social media-savvy: Bowie regularly posted teasers and promotional material for albums, and had a great amount of communication with his fans, for one.
But social media is a bigger part of all this, as the notion of celebrity gossip has now become an all-encompassing aspect of the digital world.
Coming from a journalistic perspective, celebrity deaths are bittersweet, the admittedly melancholic upside being a story that everyone wants to read, share and discuss.
So celebrity deaths often make headline news worldwide, with newspapers and networks battling it out for coverage. The New Yorker, for instance, ran a quaint yet moving cover in memorium of Prince.
Arguably, we as a society have a pretty morbid fascination with death, which leads to celebrity deaths taking over frontpage news for a day.
It ties into our ideas of supersitition and conspiracy: celebrities are almost universally known, so we all feel a kind of shared grief when one dies. That drives a lot of reaction and, in some cases, crazy conspiracies.
That has a name: “Apohenia”, or the tendency for our brains to make connections between seemingly unrelated information. “Triaphilia” takes this a step further, making a connection based on things happening in threes, and it pops up frequently in stories on celebrity deaths.
Even a quick peruse of celebrity death stories uncovers a multitude of articles on Triaphilia, the name given to a fascination with the number three. It happened in 2008 with the deaths of Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Ed McMahon. Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison all famously died within weeks of each other in 1970. And there’s many more where that came from.
Temple University professor of Mathematics John Allen Paulos addressed that very triumvirate in an article for ABC News in the U.S, laying out the roots of triaphilia and we naturally lean towards grouping celebrity deaths together.
In the above article, Paulos said our brains look for connections between disparate elements all the time; it’s our way of making sense out of seemingly unrelated things.
"If Jackson hadn't died, then believers could point to the deaths of David Carradine, Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett as illustrating their claim."
- John Allen Paulos
And that makes a lot of sense. It’s much easier to believe that Jimi, Janet and Jim are all on the dark side of the room, jamming out, than it is to know they’ve died.
It’s hard to let go of artists who create works that appeal to you on a personal level. The person who go you through the two weeks of crying after that really, really bad break-up can’t die, can they?
They can, and do, and there’s not much we can do about it, as much as we might want to.
The good news is that many celebrities leave a lasting legacy after their death, and are remembered for a long time by the impact they made.
Prince, a lifelong philanthropist and by most accounts generous and warm person, will likely be remembered as such.