Photo via Instagram / Run Along Forever
Run Along Forever
At one point, it was a common gripe amongst local musicians that Milwaukee’s hip hop scene was too divided to succeed. While the era of social media and streaming has helped bridge many gaps, the competitive nature of the genre left divisions in Milwaukee that felt as petty as Juneau and Kilbourn building streets that intentionally never lined up. A few projects have made efforts to unite the city’s emcees of all backgrounds, but Run Along Forever’s recent 20-track, 30-artist compilation feels exceptionally special.
With a spoken word intro from DJay Mando, the premise is clear; to deliver a project that not only united Milwaukee artists of all backgrounds, but to help elevate the city’s music community in a way that it would not be skipped over in discussions of national or even Midwestern music. The coordination of the project comes from Nolan Busalacchi and Eli Stamstad, videographers turned multimedia producers who made a habit of linking up with the city’s artists.
“I’ve been shooting music videos for almost two years now” explained Busalacchi. “One day, Eli and I sat down and we were like ‘how can we take this to the next level?’ and that’s how Run Along Forever started as a duo. We made all these relationships through shooting videos for artist, and one of our friends said ‘why don’t you make an album with all of your friends’ and it kept growing from there.”
The sound of Run Along Forever is incredibly contemporary, leaning heavily into the internet-driven energy that has created its own subgenre, thriving on Spotify playlists and making TikTok and Instagram videos into a music discovery platform. The beauty of the project, though, is how each artist brings their unique rapping styles to the production, and curation from the duo merges contrasting deliveries. For instance, YouTube underground standout Chicken P is featured on “Don’t Play With Me” alongside Run Along’s pop-oriented DaylinXL, and “Bad Times” features the pop and soul stylings of Corey Pieper, Jayne Joyce, and Rina respectively. Essentially, the compilation serves as a sonic jigsaw puzzle, with each artist needing to fit into the right pocket in order for the whole album to work properly. The collaboration on display will hopefully introduce Milwaukee hip hop fans to new artists along the way.
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“A goal of this project was to get artists to collaborate with each other that probably normally wouldn’t have worked together” said Busalacchi. “We basically got to the point where there were so many people on this that we had to make sure everyone got on it. We wanted to encapsulate the whole city on this.”
In addition to the compilation, visuals are a strong suit of Run Along Forever as a production duo, with clips for “Happy Days” featuring Genesis Renji and Bisca Rae, as well as “Patience” with Von Alexander, DaylinXL, Lucien Parker and Djay Mando already online. It’s to be assumed that more pieces of the album will get the visual treatment, with a steady rollout of videos giving the album extra legs in the current here today, gone tomorrow streaming environment.
“I was really blown away by how into it everyone got” said Busalacchi. “Everyone came really wanting to contribute their own piece of it, and making sure they were represented well. I’m really excited to share this with the city.”
You can stream Run Along Forever on all platforms right now.
