It May Be True

that there have been no more celebrity deaths this summer, let alone year, than previous ones, but it's the prominence of the celebrities that makes it striking.

It was the same case in 1977 as well, when a huge number of major celebrities died.

But this explanation has been offered as to why a perception of there being more celebrity deaths this summer exists:

Consider that along with the death of Mr. Jackson, there were two other profound, if less sensational, losses in the music world: Les Paul, the inventor of the electric guitar, who is credited with transforming 20th-century pop music; and Ellie Greenwich, less known by her own name than by songs she wrote with Phil Spector and Jeff Barry — some of the biggest hits of the 1960s, including “Leader of the Pack,” “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Be My Baby.”

This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.

“This is a historical development in cultural history,” said Todd Gitlin, 66, the sociologist and author of “The Sixties,” who teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. “It’s the ebbing of figures who have a wide enough span of appreciation and admiration so they appeal to significant numbers of people, like incarnations of virtue. So people take a new measure of themselves when they ask, ‘Will there ever be anybody else like X’ ”?

In short, through these celebrities' deaths, baby boomers especially become aware of their own mortality. After all, they are now the "older generation."