‘The Raven and the Rose’: Tradition and Death/Doom Metal Music

Death/doom metal music, a style of extreme metal, emerged around the beginning of 1990s with a genius loci in West Yorkshire. While this style dispersed around the globe during this decade and later decades, the pioneers of this style -namely Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, and Anathema- quickly moved on from the style which they are credited to originate. This rapid stylistic shift made the fans comprehend the three bands in ways which the tradition in death/doom is reflected. For example, even though, from a musicological standpoint, My Dying Bride have gone through significant changes in their style over their career, ethnographic research shows that the majority of fans of this music world considers My 88 Dying Bride to be the most traditional of the three, while equating Anathema with change. This results in many fans dismissing Anathema’s music with just ‘change’ without articulation. When larger metal music culture’s emphasis on tradition is considered, this attitude of valuing tradition can be considered to be an inherited tradition in itself. Furthermore, ethnography of this music world illustrate that one of the main reasons this world became a separate culture from a larger metal or even extreme metal culture arises from the style’s perceived difference from the other metal musics. The dichotomy of craving difference and valuing tradition at the same time dawns as one of the conventional behaviours in this music world. As implied from the name of the style, a style of contrasts is reflected in contrasting behaviour. The proposed paper discusses this contrast using ethnographic data of the fan culture alongside musicological analyses of the bands’ music and articulates the implications of tradition in death/doom metal music