Invisible Oranges
- Story by Nick Green
Decibel details the bitter history of the still ripe invisble orange phenomenon
By now everyone knows the secret history of the most famous gesture in metal, and who popularized it. Ronnie James Dio claims that his superstitious grandmother threw the horns to ward off—or alternately, give—her Italian peers the mal’occhio (evil eye). Dio apparently understood the dark forces at work in Black Sabbath’s music better than his predecessor, Ozzy Osbourne; Ozzy flashing a peace sign during “War Pigs” was a fairly common occurrence before Dio stepped into the picture. After a short-lived attempt to popularize bat-biting as a national pastime, even Ozzy bowed to the power and popularity of the horns in tacit, realizing that metalheads and old-world Italians needed exactly the same thing: a way of expressing themselves that didn’t involve grabbing their own balls.
But what of the second most famous gesture in metal, a hand position so ubiquitous in publicity stills that even its most ardent supporters claim has already reached its tipping point? Like Clint Eastwood in a Sergio Leone film, this gesture doesn’t even have a consistent name—but you know it’s bad-ass when it appears on the horizon. The least imaginative amongst us simply call it “The Claw,” which is the easiest way to describe what happens when you extend your arms and curl the fingers on one or both of your hands like your heroes in Immortal. According to metal historian and Sound of the Beast author Ian Christe, it’s as if the bearer is in “possession of a great unseen mighty force,” and that force is roughly the size of a large invisible orange or a small invisible grapefruit. Why invisible fruit? To paraphrase former Florida Citrus Commission spokeswoman Anita Bryant: a day without (invisible) oranges is like a day without sunshine.
Of course, people have been bitching forever that the metal horns gesture has been co-opted by the mainstream and devalued through constant, numbing repetition. As the horns neared extinction in the 1990s and the old arms-folded-across-chest standby wasn’t cutting it, the door swung wide open for the Invisible Orange—and its close relatives “The Claw,” “The Doom Hand,” “The Crystal Ball” and “Black Metal Hands”—to spread like a virus. Last month’s “Death Metal Special” issue of Decibel may have had the highest Invisible Orange-to-page ratio yet (see sidebar): aside from cover stars Cannibal Corpse and repeat offenders Morbid Angel, photos of Torture Killer, Aeon and Kataklysm in perfect Invisible Orange formation appeared on three consecutive pages. Avril Lavigne and Carson Daly, please pull out your notepads.
“I think you have to throw the word ‘evil’ into the equation,” says former Mr. Show stalwart and lifelong metal fan Brian Posehn, who’s currently working on a stand-up comedy album for Relapse. “Because an orange isn’t very metal, you know? Oranges are good for you; vitamins are the antithesis of metal. I have no idea where the gesture originated, though. I like to imagine that someone got very bored with the horns and started imagining himself as a vampire with a crazy claw. So in the traditional sense, the gesture means: I’m gonna steal your soul with this claw… and maybe eat some fruit. Of course, it means something completely different when a black metal dude does it. It’s like they’re saying: Look at my gigantic balls! They may actually be cradling an invisible pair of testicles.”
Karl Sanders—owner of the best Southern drawl this side of Horton Foote—won’t go as far as to equate the gesture with what’s in your pants, though size certainly matters to the Nile frontman. “We use the term ‘invisible orange’ and ‘invisible grapefruit’ interchangeably, but it’s clear that you’re holding something bigger than a softball—it’s more like a large grapefruit or a small cantaloupe,” he explains. “It’s best when accompanying genuine anguish or a dark, emotional moment. You can’t just whip it out on cue. There has to be some genuine fucking dark force flowing through to actually do this right. That said, there’s definitely a tongue-in-cheek element built in there. I can’t take anyone who does it seriously, and it has definitely been banned from all future Nile publicity photos. Even when we do it, we’re laughing and joking around as if we’re making fun of a bad zombie movie.”
Rock photographer Jeremy Saffer has snapped enough photos of bands (metal or otherwise) making the gesture in the last five years that he may actually be a shareholder in the Invisible Orange Corporation. “I’m sure you can attribute it to horror movies from back in the day, but I think it has a more utilitarian purpose,” he notes. “I think of it as a gesture brought out on stage to summon something. Black metal bands seem to do it to embody all that is evil. Chuck Billy brings it out during his heaviest—and most ‘evil’—vocal parts; Rob Halford uses it to usher in his higher range. It’s always employed to accentuate strong lows or strong highs, to emphasize certain lyrics or parts of songs. It’s a cue for the listener to start paying attention.”
What the Invisible Orange really needs is a sponsor, someone to step forward like Dio and unravel the mystery behind the gesture. Metalcore bands can’t claim ownership, because when you see Avenged Sevenfold making the gesture, it’s really just an ironic nod to the legacy of the black metal bands captured in the “Top 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time” meme from the Ruthless Reviews website. Fenriz and Immortal can’t own it, because they’re really just paying tribute to the death and thrash metal progenitors who used and abused it. Slayer, Bathory and Sodom—as much as we’d like to end the discussion right here—might have originated it if Alice Cooper hadn’t already appropriated the gesture from the fifth act of Hamlet or the Grand Guignol theatrical tradition or (possibly) some Italian gesture used to connote a really large pair of ‘nads. So it’s on to the missing link between the Coop and thrash metal, even if the man we’re most eager to anoint as the King of Invisible Oranges only reluctantly accepts the crown.
“To be honest with you, I didn’t know that there was anything like that or that people had a term for it,” demurs King Diamond, though a quick search on Google Images would suggest that Invisible Oranges are as much a part of his daily routine as brushing his teeth. “I never stood in front of a mirror to practice poses. Obviously, I have to pay attention to what I’m doing in order to apply make-up, and I have a general awareness of how it will look on stage if I raise one of my eyebrows. But if you asked me what I was doing with my hands on stage during a certain performance, I’d have no clue. It’s all just natural feelings, flowing through my body. It’s a way for me to involve the audience, I guess—sometimes it’s sinister, and sometimes it’s just good-hearted humor. My purpose is to entertain people, not to make them leave feeling like crap.”
We can’t fault King Diamond for expressing utter confusion over his role in popularizing the Invisible Orange, since none of our panel of experts seemed to be able to agree upon where the gesture exactly originated. Candlemass, Kreator and Judas Priest all came through our police line-up, though Ian Christe prefers to attribute to the gesture to Conrad “Cronos” Lant of the seminal British trio Venom. It makes a ton of sense: Venom was easily as much of a galvanizing force for Metallica as Mercyful Fate—and a bigger influence still on the development of black metal.
“It sure feels like a Venom innovation,” notes Christe. “They’re always depicted holding things, like kung-fu swords and torches, but they’ve assumed the proper position: intentionally hunched-over like cavemen. You definitely see it in that Slayer photo that came out after Hell Awaits, where they’re crawling all over a bloody virgin and grabbing each other’s hair. They’re kind of making claws. Right after that, everyone was in the pose. All of the German and South American bands were doing it. But most people think of it as a classic black metal pose: you’re holding the immense awe you have for your own black metal spirit and the great power and force of this music.”
Which may also explain why Christe describes the Invisible Orange as something a performer simply can’t share with the audience: “The horns, as a gesture, is a very social antenna for metal power. You’re throwing out this power and you’re receiving it in return; you expect the audience to give the horns back. It’s not like that with ‘the claw’—it’s a very selfish gesture, which is why it’s so wrapped up in black metal. If you’re bragging about your own power and you’re into your own thing and you’re basically facing yourself when you make the gesture, you don’t walk up to someone and give them the claw and expect them to give it back to you. It’s not reciprocal; it represents a hoarding of metal power.”
According to Mike Thompson of the hybridized death/black/doom metal quartet Withered, social stigma may have prevented the Invisible Orange from assuming a position in metal equivalent to the horns. “I’ve been playing in metal bands for 15 years now and I’ve been to my fair share of shows, and I still don’t see it much,” he notes. “At best, I’ll maybe see one person in a crowd throw up the claw hand in response to a band—but as quick as they’re up, they’re down. It’s usually just one or two guys doing it, like those dudes who stand in the corner wearing trench coats and get really into a singer’s contortions and make pentagrams and flaming upside down-crosses with their fingers and shit.”
For the last six months, former Autopsy Commission singer Donovan Breazeale has been preparing for a full-scale Invisible Orange invasion with his new group, a stoner rock outfit named—you guessed it—Invisible Orange. “Man, I’ve been waiting to use this band name forever,” he explains. “It’s such an obscure thing: people do it and they’ve seen it done, but they don’t necessarily place it. But that gesture, as a hand signal, just encompasses everything. During the heaviest parts of the music, it’s time to pull the claw out. During the most demonic or evil passage in the lyrics: the claw. When you’re pissed off: the claw. Anything that has any balls to it at all demands the claw. Outstretched, up, down, backwards—it doesn’t matter. I can’t think of any other hand gesture that communicates more. It’s always been this really happy thing for me.”
“I never expected Avril Lavigne to be throwing the goat horns, and we saw that happen,” laments Sanders. “It’s even harder to imagine her doing the Invisible Orange. But what would it mean to the world of metal if a pop star came out and did it? These are dangerous times that we’re living in, where there are so many instances of artists pillaging non-commercial genres and using it to be cool. This should be like an arsenal of nuclear weapons—the gesture should be conserved for when it’s really needed.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” adds Thompson, with a semi-sarcastic tone in his voice that we’ve chosen to willingly misinterpret as a genuine reflection of his feelings. “It would be a horrible shame for me to keep the claw to myself—I want everybody in the world to experience it.”
We do too.
