Real name bones. Ok, cult: Bones - “Dystopia”
Bones has several musical projects, an independent label called TeamSESH, a pack of different-sized imitators, and world fame that appeared, as it happens now, almost out of nowhere. Until recently, he seemed like just a funny guy, passionate about the aesthetics of the nineties, VHS and monotonous reading. Today his performances resemble an occult performance and balance on the brink between macabre dance and hardcore gig of the 80s. The interest of listeners in numerous releases and psychedelic short videos, contrary to all expectations, is only growing. Yesterday Bones was just young and strange, now he has transformed into a preacher who has gone beyond the usual ideas about hip-hop.
If you want to escape from the whole, take a closer look at the details. Here's the first point: an ordinary American teenager, running around the district and taking time off from boring classes, too thin and absent-minded to become some kind of high school baseball star. This is Elmo Kennedy O'Connor. He appeared on the web horizon in 2010 under the nickname Th@ Kid with the release of “Cousi n Eddie” - by the way, he was only 14 years old then. The influence of hardcore rap was felt in early childhood - even then he heard tracks from the Louisiana labels No Limit and Cash Money. At the age of 16, it’s like a classic of the genre, saying goodbye to school in Michigan and hastily leaving to join his older brother in Los Angeles. Here there was a chance acquaintance with Eddie Baker from Raider Klan and inspiration, supported by doping. Then the turning point - after a meeting with Javier Wolf and Chris Travis in 2012, the TeamSESH label appeared (apparently named after a favorite pastime - with a bong and rolling a cigarette), which immediately had a clear stylistic orientation: references to 90s gangster rap and horrorcore , lo-fi sound, theme of prohibited substances, filming with an analog camera, short tracks of two and a half minutes. Due to the infernal orientation and obvious differences from the classical idea of hip-hop, Bones and the company were classified into all sorts of genres: both experimental flax and witch house, they even came up with the label “cloud rap”. Team Sech, in addition to Wolf, Travis and Dead boy himself, as Bones sometimes calls himself, was joined by Na$sty Matt, Dylan Ross, vegardveslelia, drip-133, Drew The Architect, Greaf and others.
The movements in the video are uncertain, the lyrics are about getting high, Fiji water and knives become symbolic - all this quickly turned into a trend. VHS and smooth reading fit seamlessly into the preferences of the Tumblr generation. This is where the rise of TeamSESH began- a starting point has appeared. All of them are characterized by fragmentation - fragmentation both in music and in visual presentation. Some of Bones' biggest releases, which have attracted fans around the world, are "DeadBoy" and "TeenWitch" (oh ba - in 2014). By the way, in " TeenWitch "It's easy to spot references to the Columbine school massacre. With the advent of the video “Spirulina” this year, it became obvious - the boy has grown up, jokes aside, he has become even more twitchy and sharp-tongued. By the way, those who are especially observant will notice that Elmo is wearing a Burzum T-shirt - the “outside hip-hop” tag. According to the manager Bones , Elliott O'Connor (yes, big brother, you didn't think so) repeatedly received offers from the big four record labels, but they all refused.
Also, together with Bones, Greaf organized a side project - surrenderdorothy, which in its impetuosity and unexpected lyricism almost outweighs other experiments. By the way, they can’t be denied their inventiveness; the source of the name - Surrender Dorothy - is actually a visual manipulation used in the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz”, in the film the expression was inscribed by a witch directly on the sky. The side project turned out to be naively crazy, like an act like stealing a car or recording the first raw audio recordings. It’s strange to hear such capacious form and imagery from the members of surrenderdorothy, but it’s impossible to deny that they succeeded, especially in iwearilove,everyplaceigo:
I wear your love every place I go
It serves me well like a coat in the cold
It braces me for the world outside
These fragile walls will fall in time.
Photo: teamseshjesus.tumblr.com Bones is not afraid to get bored - the new tracks are serial, like machine-gun shots, and the impact is appropriate: the audience tunes into a standby mode. The main news channel for TeamSESH is not the pages of music magazines and thematic sites, but the Twitter of Bones himself, and try to argue with the definition of “independent” here, the web is generally ubiquitous. A crowd of young people follows the “heretic” who deviates from standards, as they once marched in rows to hippie communes or believed in the Antichrist-soup star. Another signal: reflections of crooked mirrors seem to grow around us - Sad Boys, $uicideboy$, Dead Dynasty appear, performing similar tricks - sometimes comical.
TeamSESH does not need exclusive photo shoots, elaborate interviews, loud scandals and scenarios. Each of the members of this team is a ghetto special effect itself, a hip-hop formation devoid of the “white” and “black” labels. The stars of the MTV format faded into obscurity, and new heroes emerged in a scene shaped by the binary system.
Sickly-thin, pale, long-haired, convulsive Bones emerges from the smoke of Mary Jane to exhale his words as the only truth, so that everyone listening may hear the hissing "Sesh". Ok, cult.
Elmo Kennedy O'Connor, known as Bones (formerly Th@ Kid) is a guy who, in less than a year, became an underground rap legend. Born on January 11, 1994 in Muir Beach, California. At the age of 7 he moved with his parents to Howell , Michigan, where he lived until he was 16 years old.
The story of the beginning of Elmo’s creative career is impressive: at the age of 16 he abandoned his studies and dull life in a small town in Michigan and went to live with his brother in Los Angeles. As a child, he was fond of hip-hop (which Elmo, by his own admission, discovered for himself even before going to kindergarten) and horror films, and even then he realized what he really should do - create strange rap.
Then there were the first creative experiments under the nickname Th@ Kid in 2012, until the same year Elmo reassembled himself as Bones. To follow up, he created his own crew called TeamSesh, consisting of musicians, beatmakers, photographers and directors - without this there was nowhere in the emerging world of Internet rap. The benchmark then was the predominantly black Raider Klan, which quickly became the ultimate measure of cool for anyone who wanted to achieve digital fame. The word "sesh" had a secret, "cool" meaning - "to get high, get high, blow."
The first serious popularity came to Bones after Raider Klan drew attention to him and promoted the young man, although Elmo was never officially part of this group. However, he still continues to communicate with former members of the clan - Javier Wolf and Chris Travis.
Like all Internet rap artists, Bones has released a huge number of releases: at the moment, there are 5 mini-albums, 1 single and 19 mixtapes - and that's only under the name Bones, not counting those he released under the name Th@ Kid. There is not a single physical one among them: in accordance with the unspoken code of honor adopted in this crowd, all releases can be downloaded absolutely free from the official TeamSesh website or well-known Western rap portals like DatPiff.
There are currently over 60 official Bones videos on YouTube, all shot in a lo-fi aesthetic on an analog Hi8 camera. The idea came to the mind of Elmo himself, who had been fiddling with this video camera since childhood and wanted to “oppose himself to the hi-fi generation” in every possible way.
Thanks to the Internet, there are more and more fans: in addition to America, Bones gathers parties in Italy and Russia. Elmo's older brother becomes his manager, the first concert tours are organized, and publications appear in major non-core publications. By mid-2014, he was surpassing, perhaps, all his colleagues in popularity.
Bones did not come up with anything new - if desired, many elements of his aesthetics can be found in the now deceased Salem, other representatives of the witch-house, the currently living Raider Klan and other Internet rap stars of various sizes. Some say that Elmo's music "reminds me of Three 6 Mafia if there was a modern internet in the '90s." However, the average Bones fan is completely indifferent to all this: he is most likely too small or indifferent to care where and what Elmo's music is borrowed from. After all, that's what a lot of artists have done, all the way back to Depeche Mode: take what's already there and make it something that's not too fancy and accessible to the masses. As a result, where is Fad Gadget now, which many new-wave bands copied, and where is Depeche Mode? That's it.
Bones sings mainly about drugs, shady dealings, the coolness of his lifestyle and his party. No matter how true it is, Elmo makes it look incredibly cool and you want to believe him. As always in hip-hop, Bones romanticizes what is initially difficult to call attractive, only adjusted for the 2010s. Flashing once again in a “Burzum” or “Darkthrone” T-shirt, he forces metalheads far from the world of hip-hop to discuss his person. It's very easy for Bones fans to associate the artist and the music with themselves: he's white, young, dark and obscure, drinks Fiji, smokes and hangs out all day with his boys.
The “whiteness” of Bones also plays an important role. Let's not pretend, everyone already understands that the main audience of modern hip-hop and similar music are white teenagers, and it is easier for them to associate themselves with Elmo than with the same Chris Travis or Javier Wolf.
Bones gives virtually no interviews, and the ones that are published are mostly a journalist's story with five short lines from Elmo. But he cultivates a community around himself: his fans are the “dead” (dead, deadgirl, deadboy), and he himself is the “god of the dead” (deadgod). He won’t agree to a major interview, but if you’re lucky, he’ll answer your fan mail on Facebook, retweet you, and if you’re very lucky, he’ll take your beat to the next mixtape or chat with you on Skype.
Elmo notes that at Bones live things happen in the spirit of a punk or metal concert: mosh, stage diving, headbanging - that is, infinitely far from hip-hop, and all because no one from the Bones party went to these most hip-hop concerts - they just love this music and interpret it in their own way. The situation with the fan base is generally extremely funny: you don’t have to like rap, know anything about hip-hop, or be from this crowd - you just need to sincerely love Bones, and you won’t be a stranger among the rest of the dead.
This magic can be easily destroyed if you dig deeper. For example, Elmo's parents are clearly not rednecks from Michigan, but rather respected designers who support their sons in their endeavors. Grandfather was a famous film actor. Brother Elliot is a video editor, and his uncle is a vocal coach who has worked, for example, with Justin Timberlake. Major labels showed interest in Bones. If you look for such details, the legend of a self-made teenager will collapse like a house of cards - and does anyone really need it?
Elmo didn't sign for the same reason that none of the Internet rap stars did: if they agreed, creative freedom could be forgotten, and this act of Bones really deserves respect. According to the assurances of both the rapper himself and colleagues like Travis, the label will try to do everything (money, substances, even such a primitive thing as delicious food) to “buy” the artist, and then dictate to him its format and its terms.
Even if such a refusal is dictated by commercial considerations (after all, the fan base is already quite large), fans will be more pleased to think that Bones is doing this in order to remain himself - a free mysterious warrior of Fiji and the joint.
Greetings to guests and regular readers of the site website. So, Elmo Kennedy O'Connor, better known to most under the pseudonym Bones, was born on January 11, 1994 in a place called Muir Beach, USA.
Our hero's mother is a seamstress and clothing designer, and his father worked as a web designer, and Elmo also has an older brother, Elliot.
When Elmo was seven years old, he and his parents moved to Michigan.
In the new place, O'Connor's life was very routine and boring, which greatly irritated the young man.
Therefore, the boy, without completing his studies, leaves his school desk and goes to his older brother in Los Angeles.
In order to somehow earn a living, the teenager begins to edit and shoot videos, and also steals a little from neighboring houses.
Bones before fame
From early childhood, the boy became interested in hip-hop, rock and horror films. Even then, O"Connor was inspired by the idea of performing rap of his own composition. And in 2010, he began to realize his old dream. He tries to make and upload his first releases online under the pseudonym Th@ Kid. Under this role, Elmo pretended to be a tough guy, and also, being “The Kid,” he released a huge number of mixtapes of not very high quality.
Th@ Kid - HIGH FRUCTOSE
Two years later he decides to change his name to Bones. In 2012, under a new cover, he published two mixtapes, some of which featured video clips with VHS cassette quality and its inherent noise.
After that, he created his own team, “TeamSesh,” which included not only musical figures, but also photographers and directors. All these people were needed to successfully create rap for the Internet environment. In his tracks, Elmo touches on the topic of psychotropic substances, criminal life, and, of course, the coolness of himself and his group.
Although, for the most part, the stories told are fictitious, fans of Bones' music really like to associate themselves with him. O'Connor created the image of a dark, tough guy who loves to have fun with his gang.
A huge impetus to Bones' world fame was given by members of the "Raider Klan" group, with whom the rapper made joint tracks. In 2013, our hero released about 9 mixtapes, the collections “Saturn” and “Creep” received special attention.
In 2014, Bones pleased listeners with five albums. Any released release by the artist can be found and downloaded on the Internet. Thanks to the World Wide Web, the young man has fans and fan communities in every corner of the world.
In 2015, Elmo already performed in full force with.
That same year, four mixtapes were published online.
Major labels have shown interest in the rap artist more than once. However, he does not intend to sign a contract with any of them, since Elmo wants to be creatively free. According to him, labels lure and buy artists, and then turn them into their own puppets and dictate their formats and conditions to them. Bones does not intend to stop, publishing a huge number of works on the Internet to the delight of his fans.
Elmo Kennedy O'Connor, better known as Bones(formerly Th@ Kid) is an underground hip-hop artist, one of the most popular representatives of the cloud rap genre. 
Born January 11, 1994 in Muir Beach, California, USA. Elmo's family is entirely creative: his mother is a fashion designer, his father is a web designer, and his older brother Elliot is a video editor. My uncle once taught Justin Timberlake how to sing. At age 7, Elmo moved with his parents to Howell, Michigan, where he lived until he was 16. At 16, he gave up his studies and boring life in a small town and went to live with his brother in Los Angeles. 
With brother 
Parents 
From early childhood, Elmo was interested in hip-hop, rock and horror films. In 2010, he tried to make and upload his first tracks to the network under the pseudonym Th@ Kid. Under this name he released a huge number of mixtapes of not very high quality. 
Two years later he decides to change his name to Bones. Under a new name, he published two mixtapes in 2012. After this, he creates his own team, TeamSesh, consisting of musicians, beatmakers, photographers and directors. 
A huge impetus to Bones' world fame was given by members of the Raider Klan team, with whom he made joint tracks. In 2013, he released about 9 mixtapes, with Saturn and Creep receiving special attention.
In 2015, ASAP Rocky in his composition Canal St. uses a sample from the song Bones Dirt, crediting him as the featured artist. Later, Elmo and Rakim performed together on the Jimmy Kimmel show.
There are more than 60 official Bones videos on YouTube, many of them shot in lo-fi aesthetics on an analogue Hi8 camera, which has become his peculiar feature.
GladWeHaveUnunderstanding
TakingOutTheTrash
RestInPeace
Elmo's Girl - Samantha 
Bones has repeatedly received offers from major record labels. But he did not sign a contract with any of them for fear of losing creative freedom. According to him, labels lure and buy artists, and then turn them into their own puppets, dictating their formats and conditions to them. Bones almost never gives interviews. He informs fans about his new releases on social networks, mainly on Twitter. All of his tracks can be downloaded absolutely free on the Internet. 
