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Leith Dunick, tbnewswatch.com
Aspiring filmmaker Matt Popowich.
From Current River to Westfort, Jordan Burnell’s hip-hop tribute to his hometown has gone viral.
My Home Town, posted to YouTube Thursday morning by aspiring filmmaker Matt Popowich, takes the 22-year old rapper throughout the city, exposing Thunder Bay landmarks while he sings the praises of the place he grew up in.
"Standing atop Mount McKay, feeling proud to say I’m from Thunder Bay," he sings in the video, which by 11 a.m. on Friday had been viewed more than 24,700 times, equivalent to about one-in-four city residents.
That also makes it the most viewed YouTube music video in Canada for Feb.5.
"I want to hear my whole city sing with me," he raps a few verses later.
Burnell, who ironically moved to Toronto for school two weeks ago, said the attention the song and video have received has caught him by surprise.
Within hours he had 36 friend requests on Facebook, where the video is being posted and reposted by anyone and everyone who ever had a connection to Thunder Bay.
"I was like, what’s going on? It’s nuts," he said, reached by phone on Friday morning at his Toronto apartment. "Last night when I went to bed it was at 6,000 (views), and then my dad just called me from T.Bay and said it’s at 20,000 or something like that."
The song, set to the sampled beat of Adele’s Home Town, references anything and everything Thunder Bay, from Terry Fox and Finnish pancakes to Crystal beer, mill closures, our love of hockey and even Uncle Neil himself.
"The same place Steve Stills met Neil Young, you can still hear him in your ear drums, Superior by nature, you may think it sounds cliché, but me, I just think it sounds T. Bay."
Burnell, who is studying audio engineering at Recording Art Canada, said his imminent departure is the main reason he decided to write the track.
"I was just driving through Thunder Bay one day, just out to get coffee, and I went to Hillcrest Park. I just looked out over the city and said, ‘I’m not going to see this for awhile,’" he said, noting the idea had been in the back of his mind for awhile, but it had never manifested itself beyond a few scattered thoughts.
Even though Burnell is a seasoned musician, a member of the local group Burnz N Hell that opened for the Swollen Members in November, he said it wasn’t easy putting those thoughts to paper and then sharing them with the world on the Internet.
"I’m not going to lie. I was nervous. You’re talking about your hometown and people have mixed views on where they’re from. It seems like people think I hit the nail on the head with that one," he said.
Of course Popowich, who did the video for free, hoping for a little publicity for his fledgling company, Westfort Films – for which he serves as the self-titled "dude who created it," had a hand in the success.
Filmed over the course of 13 hours, a timeframe that included a clandestine visit to AbitiBowater’s paper mill before security marshaled them off the property, Popowich said the ideas just started flowing as soon as he heard the songs and its Thunder Bay references.
"It comes to you naturally, you know. Let’s get a shot of Terry Fox, Mount McKay.
Then, for a couple of hours me and my buddies just drove around and we just looked around town and whatever screamed Thunder Bay out to us, we just made sure we got a nice shot out of it."
And what does scream Thunder Bay to Popowich, 21, a Westgate grad who hopes to enter film school within the next couple of years?
"Pretty much everything you see in the video. We just drove around and looked at stuff that struck a chord with us. I tried to shoot as many locations that I knew people would recognize, especially people from out of town, like university students, who would see the Hoito and say, ‘I’ve been there, that’s deadly."