Less than a minute into the video to “Brass in Pocket,” the Pretenders’ #14 pop hit from 1980 – one of the first clips ever aired on MTV — we see teddy-boy-coifed bassist Pete Farndon maneuvering a pink whale of a gas-guzzler toward the diner where Chrissie Hynde is waitressing. All three male Pretenders are aboard, and they’re all British, as is most of the slang in the song (“got bottle,” “skank,” “reet,” plus that title signifying pocket change), but the car is American; steering wheel’s on the left-hand side. Hynde is cooing something about “driving, Detroit leaning,” and Farndon’s doing a pretty decent approximation: Looks cool and relaxed, with only his left hand guiding the wheel.
At least “Detroit leaning” seems the overwhelming consensus choice of what she’s saying there. As always, not everybody on the Internet agrees. Some people hear “detour,” and a Dublin woman called Swallow goes even further out on a limb: “Feminine intuition tells me it’s ‘been diving, ditalini.’ Ditalino is Italian for a pleasurable activity women engage in on their own.” (Fingers are reportedly required.) But “Detroit leaning” makes the most sense – Hynde came from Northern Ohio (raised in Akron, schooled at Kent State around the time of the shootings), and that’s pretty close. (Growing up in Michigan, I learned that the two states even had a war over Toledo a long time ago. Michigan won, so Ohio had to keep Toledo.)
Lyndhurst, Ohio Internetter Kurt defines Detroit leaning as “a style of driving – one hand on the wheel, head back against the headrest, seat tilted back, usually while singing to the radio”; Peter from Buffalo stipulates that the wheel-hand’s “in the 12 O’Clock position.” (In the video, Farndon’s is maybe at 10 or 11 – Close enough.) Others say the method is popular throughout the entire Midwest.
Or was popular, at least once upon a time. The Rust Belt is not what it once was. In the wake of World War II, Detroit’s population climbed toward the 2 million mark; now it’s barely over a third of that, and still slipping despite gallant efforts to re-seed it from personal garden plots up. Driving has changed, too. “It’s probably too hard to lean and text at the same time,” suburban Detroit-raised Village Voice arts and culture editor Brian Parks suggested to me. “Also, would this include leaning while driving the tractor on your urban farm?” A website devoted to 24 “Rules To Driving in Metro Detroit” lists helpful hints like “Turn signals are just clues as to your next move in road battle so never use them” and “Remember that the goal of every Detroit driver is to get there first, by whatever means necessary,” but nothing at all about leaning.
Still, the myth persists. Youtube even has a Jughead-hatted joker calling himself OB who ineptly attempts to demonstrate Detroit leaning from the couch in his mom’s basement, until she calls him to dinner: “He’s leaning so far back, you pull up next to him, all you see is his head, you don’t even see his shoulder,” he explains. “My head is probably coming out of the backseat window.” Pantomiming a left hand turn, he scrunches into his “stankface” then starts making furious concentric circles with his hand – Weird thing is, though, if he’d actually driven much around the Motor City, he’d be familiar with the “Michigan left turn,” which is really a right turn followed by U-turn. The first one was apparently installed at the corner of 8 Mile and Livernois way back in the early ‘60s, to cut down on accidents.
And everybody knows that physics itself makes your body lean right when you steer your ride left, right? So maybe OB is just confused. Perhaps he’s mixing up the Detroit lean with the related but seemingly distinct “gangsta lean,” as made famous in such even-bigger-than-“Brass In Pocket” hits as William DeVaughn’s 1974 “Be Thankful For What You Got” (where “diggin’ the scene” occurs) and Dr. Dre with Snoop Dogg’s 1993 “Nuthin’ But A G Thang” (where said lean is said to be “hellafied.”) At least one expert on urbandictionary.com suggests different hands might be used: “A gangsta lean is not leaning to the inside of your car, that is for pussys who are scared. The proper lean is with the right hand on the wheel, leanin’ to the left, so everybody can see yo’ mug.”
Or maybe gangsta leans are funk, and Detroit leans new wave. Except in early ‘80s Detroit, the barrier between those was quite permeable, as well. Wonder what Electrifying Mojo and Was (Not Was) think.
Vulture, 2015
Eliminated for Reasons of Space 