Who has nearly 5 MILLION monthly listeners on Spotify, is considered a pioneer of emo rap, is opening for LimpBizkit’s European tour this spring, and grew up in Howell?
It’s Elmo O’Connor — the Howell High School dropout who performs as Bones and is one of the biggest underground rappers in the industry. He has achieved his success without ever signing with a record label, and he remains a fiercely independent, wildly prolific artist.
After 9/11, when he was 7 years old, O’Connor moved from Northern California to Howell with his parents, who bought a house in Marion Township so they could be close to his paternal grandfather, who lived in Brighton. (For fans of “I Spy” and “Everybody Loves Raymond,” his maternal grandfather is the late actor Robert Culp.)
In interviews, O’Connor shares how his father — who was born in Detroit — and his mother shaped his musical tastes by introducing him to the music of artists like Marvin Gaye; Earth, Wind & Fire; Stevie Nicks; and Joni Mitchell. His song “YouKnowIWantYou,” below, feels inspired by the musicians who laid the foundation for his musical journey.
O’Connor was 9 when he started downloading hip hop instrumentals onto his father’s iMac and using the computer’s microphone to record himself rapping.
In 2010, when he was a 16-year-old junior at Howell High School, he released his first mixtape under the alias “Th@ Kid”; after that, he dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue his music career. He officially changed his stage name to Bones in 2012.
In the years since, O’Connor became a frontrunner in the underground punk-rap scene on SoundCloud, and he’s proven to be a most prolific artist, with well over 100 albums, mixtapes and EPs released online. He’s performed with the likes of A$AP Rocky, is the founder of the music collective TeamSESH, and maintains three long-term musical projects.
He also creates in a wide variety of musical styles. Here is a video he posted online in January that exists as a love letter of sorts to Michigan.
— BONES (@TeamSESH) January 11, 2025
He also performed last year in a modified Red Wings jersey. (You can watch that performance by clicking here.)
Bones ranks No. 740 on Spotify’s Top 1,000 most-streamed artists of all time, with over 3.3 billion streams.
For comparison, Taylor Swift has the most streams on Spotify of all time, with her songs streamed over 92 billion times; Eminem comes in at No. 7. Bones’ number of streams puts him in the neighborhood of Prince, who ranks No. 705; Gwen Stefani, who ranks No. 724; and Keith Urban, who ranks No. 752.
You can check out the list of his most-popular songs on Spotify by clicking here.
Here is Bones performing with A$AP Rocky:
The move from Howell to California seems to have been just what O’Connor needed to kick his fledgling music career into high gear. In an interview he said that his friends in Howell “weren’t doing anything much.”
“It’s so different out here (in Hollywood),” he said. “It seems like everybody has the ambition to accomplish something.”
The years O’Connor spent in Howell seem to have been both illustrative and formative for him.
In a 2017 interview, O’Connor talked about Howell’s racist reputation: “Even though we’re 45 minutes from Detroit and you’d think it wouldn’t be that big of a problem, it’s a huge problem,” he said. “There were kids that would act racist but would still listen to ‘President is Black, My Lambo is Blue,’ like Young Jeezy. I remember this kid pulled up in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag and that (was) playing and I was just like, ‘what the f—k?’ And there’s just nothing to do there. They’re born and they die there. Their parents are born there, they’re gonna die there.”
And yet, Howell was part of the inspiration for his son’s name. In another interview in 2021, when he was asked why his son, then 2, was given the name Howl, O’Connor explained: “We love the movie ‘Howl’s Moving Castle,’ and I’m from a place called Howell,” he said. “I don’t know, it just felt right.”
If you want to read more about O’Connor, click here.
To listen to Bones’ essential tracks on Spotify, click here.
