The Year Pop died: Celebrity Grief, Memory, Media and Generations

In 2016 – the annus horribilis of pop – the death of music artists such as David Bowie, George
Michael and Prince produced a prodigious amount of commemorative initiatives, both spontaneously
and within the media and celebrity worlds, with an impressive level of online expressions
of grief. Addressing these three cases within the framework of social generation studies, celebrity
theory and death studies, the paper proposes some hypotheses on the role that the death of celebrities
plays in the construction of generational identity as “discursive articulation” where specific
media practices/representations (in our case, mourning practices) play a crucial role in making
generational narratives group together around shared symbolic and semantic cores.