THUNDER BAY - When George Palosaari, better known by his stage name, Preme, first picked up a mic more than 10 years ago for an MC battle, he was booed off the stage.
“It was a really horrible moment for me,” he said. “I actually thought of quitting after that. It kind of crushed my dreams. I thought I was all prepared and ready for it, but I guess I wasn’t at all.”
But Palosaari didn’t give up, no matter how horrible that first experience was, and his determination has paid off. Now, the hip-hop artist plays to cheering crowds, has performed across the country, and this year he has been nominated for several national hip-hop awards.
Palosaari and his debut album have been nominated in six categories with the Canadian Urban Television Hip-Hop Awards. The categories include break-through artist of the year, collaboration of the year, music video of the year, rap album of the year, rap single of the year, and song of the year.
“I was kind of shocked at first,” Palosaari said. “I noticed that some of the nominees in the same category are really big artists that I really look up to in Canada, like Drake and Classified and Jazz Cartier who just got the Juno. I was kind of overwhelmed to see how many talented people were alongside me.”
This is the third annual the Canadian Urban Television Hip-Hop Awards and Palosaari said in the first two years, he didn’t have anything he was happy with submitting. After submitting this year, he said there is added pressure being nominated alongside so many big-name artists.
“I knew I was happy with the content I was submitting, but once it’s out on a national level, you are sort of worried it won’t be received as well as it was locally,” Palosaari said. “A lot of people really like my music in Thunder Bay, but I also did a tour in 2015 and I got to know a lot of local musicians and a lot of fans across Canada.”
Palosaari’s debut album, Most Wanted, was released in September, 2016 and was a project two years in the making. Since its release, Most Wanted is already gaining popularity, not only in Canada, but across the world.
“The fact that I have a lot of people listening to the album and supporting it means a lot,” he said. “People are listening to it in more than 24 countries and I’ve already got more than 20,000 streams online on all the digital stores.”
But that support started at home. Palosaari has been making music for nearly 15 years, and despite some setbacks and taking time to raise a family, he has been doing it full time since 2012.
“But just the fact that people believed in my dream and urged me to keep going kind of led me to where I am now,” he said. “We have a really supportive community.”
“It’s just a really good thing for Thunder Bay to finally have our musicians getting more spotlight in different genres,” he continued. “In the hip hop scene, it has been something that has been so underground for such a long time. Now that I’m going out of Thunder Bay to put hip hop on a more national level is a really big thing.”
When Palosaari first took to the stage again in 2012, he was nervous, as memories of his first time on stage came flooding back. But he wasn’t going to let that stop him.
“I decided to give it one last go, throw a couple tracks out, I never really looked at making it a career, it was something I really enjoyed doing,” he said. “I decided to push through and by the time I got to the end of my song list, the whole place was cheering and applauding.”
Winners of the Canadian Urban Television Hip-hop Awards will be announced at a ceremony in Toronto on May 6. Fan voting is still open on the website at www.cuthiphopawards.com.
