Ottawa rapper drops new tune about Island Park Drive

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Years ago, Peter Joynt rolled up the rim and won big.

Now, the part-time Ottawa rapper has chosen to roll down the window and chill.

Instead of grinding his teeth or screaming obscenities at the city’s traffic woes, Joynt is embracing an easy-going pace in his new feel-good video, Island Park Drive.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the street and the name alone,” says Joynt, 45, who grew up in the area and is perhaps best known for his CapCity video and the seven-song connection with the Ottawa Senators that followed.

“It sounds so tropical. It sounds as though it should be some fancy street in some place warm. Yes, the traffic is just horrendous. It took a while, but now that I’m older and I’m a dad now, I understand this concept of going slow and enjoying the ride instead of speeding somewhere as fast as I can.”

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Joynt isn’t making a living rapping by any means.

He calls it a “moonlighting” gig, part of an intriguing life that now includes a day job entertaining fellow Shopify employees and side engagements talking to children about having lived with a pronounced stutter since he was four years old.

He’s strait-laced and the Volvo he drives in the video is an indication of having entered into a mid-life phase.

Joynt’s musical influences include Mos Def: “a super smart guy, who is not all about pimps and ‘hos and cars and cash.”

When Joynt sings about Ottawa, he typically chooses to find the silver lining amid the city’s dark clouds.

Capcity, which came out in 2011, extols the virtues of Ottawa amid a backdrop of some of the city’s landmarks, including Maman, the giant spider outside the National Gallery.

As for his decade-old Senators-related videos, they might be a tad sad for the club’s fans: reminders of better days, including highlights of former stars Daniel Alfredsson, Erik Karlsson, Mark Stone, Erik Karlsson, Bobby Ryan and Kyle Turris, along with scenes from the remarkable Hamburglar story.

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“It’s clean, it’s green, it’s safe, it’s all of these things, but it’s got these things that are so frustrating,” Joynt says of Ottawa. “We can’t get the LRT right. We can’t seem to pull ourselves together and have a scene downtown. There are all these speed bumps and hurdles, but you can still exist within that. We still have all these awesome pockets of the city, but you have to search them out to get to the cool spots.”

Good fortune has come to him, including winning a car in Tim Horton’s Roll Up the Rim contest and raking in $13,000 during a 50/50 draw at an Ottawa Redblacks game, but he also believes rewards come from hard work.

All of that fits into the bigger picture of positivity he has embraced after the early speed bumps in his life, working through bullying and rejection.

Remarkably, the stutter disappears when he raps.

“Around Grade 7, I discovered a workaround and a way to get the words out,” he says. “I found if I used an accent or sang or if I rapped, if I used all of these voices to keep up in social situations, it would bring me out of my shell.

“I went from being an introverted guy to being an extroverted guy.”

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Indeed, the nuances of brain chemistry are fascinating.

While it’s an area of ongoing research, most people tend to use the left side of the brain for speaking and the right side of the brain for music and other creative pursuits.

Stutterers, according to Joynt, use the right side of the brain for speaking.

There are therapies for stroke patients that attempt to engage the undamaged right side for language by combining speech with music.

“It’s the same idea for me, a re-wiring of my brain,” he says. “But if I rap, it reverses the switch.”

Joynt believes the makeup of his brain helps explain why making music, including playing instruments and mixing sounds, might come easier to him than to others.

Karine Gauvin, a speech-language pathologist and part-time professor at the University of Ottawa, has invited Joynt to speak to her classes for the past four years.

“For many people who stutter, they stutter less when they sing because of intonation and rhythm and the words can be memorized,” she says. “The pace is typically slower and the vowels are longer.”

Gauvin marvels at what Joynt has accomplished.

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Just the same, his first serious ventures into the music business were hardly a raging success.

“I started to write rap songs and send them to record companies and radio stations and promoters and those who did respond said, ‘those are garbage and they suck,’” he says, laughing.

“But I kept going, I wanted to improve.”

By day, he continued to work in communications for IT companies.

After the Capcity breakthrough, a school came calling, asking Joynt to talk about his life for a career day.

“As soon as I started talking, I was stuttering and all of the questions shifted from rapping to stuttering, and I was asked if I was teased and bullied,” he says.

“Then I had to take the time to do a proper presentation and figure out how to tell the story.”

He’s still telling it, making his 200th school appearance earlier this year.

“It’s about the concept of resiliency,” he says. “You can kicked down or cut from a sports team or fail a test, but you have to say f-that, study hard, train harder and improve to show yourself that you can do it. Life is hard and full of all these challenges.”

That message is a hit, according to Lisa Brancati, a resource teacher at St. Augustine School.

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“So many kids who stutter suffer self-esteem issues,” she says. “This guy comes in and he’s so young and funny. He doesn’t come in as a singer, he comes in talking to the kids as a stutterer and talks a lot about being bullied and overcoming it.”

All of the above eventually dovetailed smoothly into his current job with Shopify.

Originally hired for what he believed was an extension of his work as a communications expert in 2019, he was then asked to produce an internal weekly town hall.

“It was an on-stage thing to be broadcast to thousands of employees and I was terrified, I’m a stutterer,” Joynt says. “But they said that’s why they wanted me to do it. I was blown away. This thing that was a flaw and a hindrance is now a tool, a tool that I use to connect with kids in schools, to show that confidence is contagious.”

When COVID-19 arrived, Joynt shifted gears again, delivering emailed video messages to Shopify employees working at home. “I write a lot of fun work songs, joke songs or Saturday Night Live-type skits,” he says.

He was on stage again during Shopify’s 20th anniversary celebrations in Toronto in late June.

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Occasionally, he works on side projects, including Croc on a Croc,” a cute, corny video featuring his daughters, Ruby and Sadie. That tune is along the lines of the work he does for Shopify.

As for Island Park Drive, he says it doesn’t have to be seen as strictly for people living in Ottawa.

“I think it’s got a universal appeal to it,” he says. “It could be any street that people are going down. Get the windows down, go slow and turn the tunes up.”

kwarren@postmedia.com
X:Citizenkwarren

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