Unknown Prophets release 'World Premiere 2' Friday at Triple Rock

Trey Fortner

​Back in 2000, two Polish-American kids from Northeast Minneapolis dropped World Premiere, a record that rattled and hummed with old school beats and classical-music samples. It was full of youthful bravado, songs like "Never" and "Wrong Route" hellbent on getting known and repping the North side.

Fast forward 11 years, and the Unknown Prophets--MCs Jesse "Big Jess" Semanko and Mike "MaD SoN" Madison, plus DJ Willy Lose--are still at it, but life, and the game, has changed. Now in the their mid-30s, the group's dreams of a record label deal and stardom have long since passed them by. Largely gone are the battle raps and party songs, replaced by matters more appropriate of guys with families and day jobs, just trying to get by.

On their last album, 2009's Le System D, the Unknown Prophets took a departure from their tried-and-true formula towards a more rock-based, live-band sound. For their latest effort, though, they've returned to their roots. Gimme Noise caught up with Big Jess and MaD SoN ahead of the World Premiere 2 release show at Triple Rock this Friday.


Gimme Noise: So you guys named the new album after your first record, World Premiere. What made you decide to reprise the title, all these years later?

Jess: Basically, I think the main reason was every time we go out of state--it doesn't matter if it was two, three, eight years after we put it out--cats would be like, "Are you going to play 'Wrong Route?' Are you going to play 'The Robbery?' And we'd be like, 'Yeah, probably, but we got some other albums too that are pretty good.' I always felt like that was our staple, our sound that cats were used to.  Then our last album was completely different from everything we've done... So I figured why not try to recreate the sound of our most popular album, take it back to the boom-bap and shit? I had a blast going back through the classical records.

MaD SoN: I think this album is an album for the fans, more so than anything. Because as a musician, as an artist, you want to do different things, which is what Le System D was... But a lot of bands, their first album is their best album, a lot of artists stay away from trying to recreate that beacuse you're just setting yourself up for failure. But we decided to give it a shot.

Jess: Except Little Wayne. I don't think anyone listens to Little Wayne's first record.

GN: Did you find yourselves conversing at all with your younger selves on this record, or was that not really a factor?

MaD SoN: The only thing with me is just writing the raps. When we started out, it's just a natural instinct to write battle-style raps. You say you're the best and refer to your own names a million times in a song. For me, that was the hardest part; we had to kind of go back to the bravado. Now we do more grown man stuff. I think as we've matured, our music has matured too.

Jess: I think it was kind of hard for him to say yes to it. I grew up with the battle-rap type stuff, it was always a part of me and I could do it at the drop of a dime. This guy's good at it but he doesn't like doing it so much... But the first World Premiere was super heavy bragging, and we had to--we were from Northeast Minneapolis; no one rapped from Northeast Minneapolis. You got laughed at. You just had to be like, 'We're not going to stand down just because you're top dogs down in South Minneapolis.' And I'm proud we did. We stood true to who we were, just two Polish guys from Northeast Minneapolis who loved hip hop.

​GN: Mike, you were kind of the driving force behind Le System D and the departure it made. Were you worried that trying to recreate World Premiere would just be too much of a step backwards?

MaD SoN: Yeah, because I felt like we'd already done that, that was an old chapter. And you always want to progress, do something different, and challenge yourself and your listeners. So I was a little hesitant, but I love classical style beats. I'm all with that. It just has such power behind it. Plus I can still write lyrics I'm happy with, but it doesn't have to be exactly like World Premiere.

GN: Do you think future records could wind up building on the rock side of things, then?

Jess: Mike is a talented musician, you know? He could play in bands and stuff. But the singing, I don't know [laughs]. He might need auto-tune.

MaD SoN: I'm working on a solo record, and I want it to start on guitar and progress into other things--add classical records in there, a cello or something. I want to make it more live music than sample based, but get some samples in there too. I'm constantly thinking about the music I'm making, what the next thing is I'll do. I would go crazy if I didn't do music. But I do think it will be more live instrumentation.

GN: It seems like this record has fewer existential sorts of crises about getting older. Would you say you guys are more comfortable now with where you're at than you were before?

Jess: When I turned 30, it was like, fuck, this is the end of everything. When I think now that I'm 35 and going to be 40 soon, then that feels like the end of everything. You just gotta roll with it; you can't control it. There's a lot of things we used to stress about for a long time, like getting a record deal. We thought that was the way to go, rapped a lot about it. We were frustrated. But then the internet came along, and the whole indie thing, and we knew we didn't need that. I can't even remember the last time we rapped about it.
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