INTERVIEW: RUN ALONG FOREVER

MILWAUKEE RAP, BORN OUT OF THE BASEMENT

In case you are new to the blog, or have a short memory, or have a job and a life and don’t have the time to follow trends in regional music, let me break down something for you: Over the past few years, the Milwaukee rap scene has been going crazy. 

In the previous nine months alone, the city has been the subject of multiple thoughtful national media articles. Milwaukee has churned out TikTok hits, street-level anthems, and less-classifiable bedroom concoctions; many songs feel like all three at the same time. Though the scene is multifaceted, a pocket of Milwaukee rap has garnered a lot of attention. It’s driven by 8th-note handclaps, leftfield sonics, and through-the-roof energy. Many call it lowend.  

Within all that, the crew Run Along Forever burst through the gate with a kind of basement punk-informed energy. Started by Nolan Busalacchi and Eli Stamstad as a vehicle to make music videos, it has developed into a more all-encompassing creative platform, one that has seen the crew book DIY shows, put together compilations, and work with artists from outside town. As someone who grew up around Milwaukee, it’s exciting to see the city spitting out so much energy.

Last week, I talked to the 21-year-old Busalacchi about house shows, Lady Gaga samples, and a whole lot more.

How would you define Run Along Forever? Do you think of it as a label, a YouTube channel? I’ve seen you call it a platform. 

We kind of bounced back and forth between what we wanted to define it as, because we were doing a lot of stuff—obviously, the music videos and some label services—but I think calling it a platform was the most all-encompassing thing. It really is just meant to be a platform to empower artists. So, whatever form that takes at any given moment. 

That seems like a very contemporary way to move. I know you've done some touring. Have you done any actual booking yourself? 

I've never booked a tour. The only time I've been on tour was the one that Polo and AyooLii took me on with Glaive, which was a super cool experience. But I have booked a bunch of shows here in Milwaukee. That was really how things started to pick up, we were doing these house shows because no venue wanted to let us perform, so we would just throw house shows on the east side. And we did that a bunch of times until those got a little bit of attention. And then finally, Cactus Club let us book a show. And we kind of took it from there. I never had any experience booking shows, we did it out of necessity because everybody wanted to perform. 

I wish I could’ve been in the room for some of those basement shows. From the footage I’ve seen, it looks like they got really rowdy. 

Yeah. They got crazy. There was one that the cops shut down in late summer, early fall. It was supposed to be in a basement, and then we ended up not being able to get the basement set up so that there could be people down there. It was just too cramped of a space and there were too many people coming. So we did it in the backyard. And then one of the neighbors called the cops and there was just this army of kids running down the street through the east side. They definitely got pretty crazy. But we try to make it as safe as possible, it’s not like we're burning the house down or anything. 

Following the Milwaukee rap scene from afar, it feels like there's a couple different pockets or sub-scenes. And you seem to be uniting some of those threads. I'm curious about how Run Along Forever started—was that a main part of the goal for you in the beginning? 

So in the beginning, it was basically me and my homie Eli. I was shooting a bunch of music videos and I needed a company name to shoot music videos under. So that was how the whole thing kind of came to be originally. And then I was filming all these videos for artists and over time they just became my friends and we became really close. And then it got to a point where everyone was collaborating. And so we all wanted to work together more and, obviously, everyone has their own sound and does their own thing. So I thought it would be cool to throw everybody on an album and see what happens. And then it was like, Okay, what is it going to sound like when this person hops on a song with this person.

Was there was there a point where you felt like the, for lack of better words, Milwaukee lowend sound kind of congealed? I know it’s a sound that has been brewing in the city for a long time. And I know that Certified Trapper took that in a whole new direction. But was there a point when you really realized, Okay, there's a new group of artists coming from different places in the city that are all kind of on the same wave. 

I've never met Certified personally, but I remember all of a sudden you just saw him everywhere doing his thing, and he was killing it. After he started getting all this attention, I really tapped in more because I was like, oh, this music is fire. I wonder who else is making it. And then that’s when I found AyooLii’s music on Instagram. And so I tapped in, and me and him just started shooting music videos. He's probably the hardest working person I know, he'll sit and he'll make a project in a day if he's feeling it. He really goes crazy. So I would just hit him up like, Do you want to shoot today, and we would go shoot like two or three videos in a day and just have fun with it. 

Once I started working with him, he kind of opened my eyes to like this whole other side of Milwaukee and the scene that was going on, specifically with the lowend stuff, because my whole experience up until that point had just been with the people that I was around. You got Lii, you got his brother, Maz. And there's so many people that started making music like that. And it really just became this big wave, like, I don't know, it kind of came out of nowhere. I remember how fast stuff started moving. I feel like I met Lii and then the next week he was like, in Rolling Stone. And that was really when I saw shit start to pick up—that era, almost exactly a year ago, is when I would say it really started to pop off. 

So AyooLii, in some ways, you think he's sort of the bridge between maybe a couple different worlds, a couple different sub-scenes of Milwaukee rap? 

Yeah, well, I think I think he's just so versatile. Like, he'll go make a lowend song. But then the next day you'll go see him make a song with Xaviersobased. We were in New York messing around the other day. He made a country song. I think because he's so versatile and talented as an artist, he was able to innovate on the sound in a bunch of ways.

How have things been changing lately in the Milwaukee rap scene?

I think the thing that's changed is I feel like everybody is more confident now, if that makes sense. Like, everyone seeing all these people blow up and go viral, and have these big moments and do all these crazy, crazy things—I think in a lot of ways that's inspiring people here to not only make music but take things really seriously and push themselves as an artist. And so I think that's the biggest change I've seen, just the attitude towards making music and being an artist and what could come with that. 

Growing up around Milwaukee, it felt like there wasn't always a template for kids to model themselves after. There was always this confusion about ambition. But what's interesting right now is people see that maybe there's a bigger ceiling on this than before. 

Yeah, well now you talk about a template, I feel like there's five, six, seven templates that you could point to.

Do you have kids hitting you up with demos?

People send me a lot of music. Yeah, actually, I get hit up more about shooting music videos for people than people just sending me their music, but there's definitely people that send me their music. I think it's really cool to see all these kids coming out being inspired by all the stuff that's going on and trying to pursue it themselves, because I think that creates a really positive environment for not only creativity, but just in general—it's an outlet, you know. 

There's a DIY spirit around this stuff, I can't help but assume there's a lot of kids in Milwaukee that are getting inspired by it and making their own shit on a really small level. 

Yeah. And I think technology plays a really big part in that. There's apps like BandLab now where you really don't even need a computer. Like, I know people personally that mainly record on BandLab with their phone and the iPhone headphone mic and they'll make a song that will be genuinely good. I think now it's probably easier than ever to blow up, with whatever you got at your disposal. 

Yeah, that's amazing. I've noticed you have slowly expanded your scope and have been working with artists outside of Milwaukee. I'm curious, where do you see that going? And what does that collaboration look like? 

I think long-term, I would love to work with anybody whose music I fuck with and it makes sense creatively, whether it's music videos, or we do something like a collaborative project, or linking a producer and an artist together. I like to keep things as open as possible. It's not just me, too. We have a whole team of people that are all working on the Run Along stuff and killing it. I've been pretty blessed to be surrounded by people who not only work as hard as I do, but everyone's amazing at their job and we all get along. It's been a really, really cool experience, especially as I've gotten to see a lot of stuff outside of Milwaukee. I've co-directed a couple music videos with Polo Perks, which was super cool. He taught me a lot of stuff. I think in the long run, I definitely still want to keep doing everything in Milwaukee and working with artists here and doing stuff here, but it would be cool to work with anybody anywhere that's making cool music or doing cool stuff. 

I mean, the dream would be that one day, Milwaukee is enough of a hub that people come to you, right? 

Yeah, well, and actually that's been really cool, too. I was just in New York for a little bit, kicking it with a bunch of artists and everyone was like, Yo, we would love to come to Milwaukee and do a show. If you had told me that five years ago, that would have been crazy. But I think there definitely is an interest in the city now and I'm really curious to see how it keeps building over time. And I do really think whether artists are being booked or if they just start coming here to tap in with people, that's something that's going to start happening more and more because there's such a buzz right now. 

The energy at these shows—it's always hard to mix genres, but it feels like the energy could work with a punk band or something. 

Yeah, no, definitely. Personally, I think a lot of what we did initially with the basement shows was inspired by old DIY punk shows and stuff, especially like, I don't know if you've ever listened to kill.dawn’s music, but a lot of his earlier stuff was very grungy and dirty and punk inspired. Even though it was rap music, there was definitely this element of like, Okay, we're gonna get grimy. And me and him, when we first met, there was a week, I think, where he did a show every single day. I think one of the last ones, it was literally just on a balcony. Like, that was the show. And then all the people stood in the yard below. And this was really, really early on, but I remember he had a kid climb up on the balcony and then he picked them up and the kid jumped off the balcony and threw a table. I was like, this is the most hardcore shit. There's definitely a little bit of punk in everything that we try to do. 

That's some backyard wrestling shit. 

Definitely. And then there was another one that we did in a garage. I think it was literally in the same week, but he took a folding chair and just smashed it into the ground. And then everyone jumped on it. And I remember sitting there like, this is the craziest shit I've ever seen. It's just like 25 people in a garage going crazy. And then from there, we started doing the basement shows. And then next thing you know, we're doing Cactus Club and opening for people and doing all this other stuff. 

I've noticed that post pandemic, the thing that kind of runs throughout a lot of the music I've been interested in is that it's so high energy.

Coming out of the pandemic, I feel like there was all this pent up energy. And now as everything has started to come back, people are definitely going crazy. I also think the type of rap that kids are super, super into, like the rage music, took over. Carti put out Whole Lotta Red, and all of a sudden there’s mosh pits everywhere. I think rap music moved in a not really rock direction, but it's punk rock inspired, just with how intense the shows got and everything. Because I don't know. I don't remember that it used to be like that. Obviously, I'm only 21. So my world experience is pretty limited, but I feel like there was definitely a shift. 

It seems to me that it's been building towards this for a while. And it reached a tipping point where it's like, OK, this isn't a novelty. I feel like for a while you would go to a rap show and kids would be in a mosh pit and it would sometimes feel like they were kind of tentative or it was a little ironic. But now it's more ingrained in the culture. 

Yeah, definitely. 

If some of that rage beat stuff is punk, I feel like some of the stuff you've been presenting, it's almost pop punk. There’s this really melodic edge to it. 

Yeah, well, and that really comes from the artists and what they're doing. It's been pretty cool watching them work. When we did “Just Bands,” which is probably the biggest Run Along song, we were basically sitting in this Airbnb in Atlanta and our main engineer Sunny, for the longest time was like, Yo, can we sample Lady Gaga? Like, who samples Lady Gaga? So we're all sitting there and Subsad pulls it up, separates the stems or whatever and then flips it in like 10 minutes. And we're all like, this is the craziest thing we ever heard. dawn hops on it, five minutes later Lii hops on it, and then five minutes later, we went and shot the video.

I think it’s the process of everybody working together, even when they're working on their own stuff, like Ethan, who I was talking about before, he'll pick the most creative sample you've ever heard and then someone will hop on it and it'll just be this crazy song. I think the Milwaukee sound works really well when people are making the beats, it reminds me of the way that sampling in New York drill went. It was like, who could find the craziest sample and hop on it? It really is all the artists. It’s crazy to watch them work because you'll be sitting there and you'll be like, Yeah, can we sample this song? And then all of a sudden you have like the craziest Milwaukee or whatever beat you've ever heard.

Yeah, I think it's inspiring how fast you all work. People who make rock music could maybe learn a lesson or two from that. 

Yeah.

It's easy for certain musicians, myself included, to get a little precious with shit. It’s a nice reminder that, if you want, you just do something, put it into the world, and move on.

We started by not taking our time with stuff. But as the productions have scaled up, it just takes more time to put stuff together. But, especially early on, someone would cook up a beat, someone would hop on it, and it would be like, Yo, you want to go shoot the video today? And it would be a 24 hour process, not even. And I would edit the video that night and we would just drop it. And it really came from us wanting to have fun and just see where we could go with stuff. 

Run Along Forever on Instagram and YouTube and SoundCloud