16 Bars – What does it really mean? All About Song Bars

We’ve all heard rappers say it and you probably heard this line:

“A-yo I spit these bars to make ya head shake”

-Drag-On |  Spit These Bars

What are bars?

When you listen to music you typically hear a repeating pattern. This pattern is repeated over and over and makes sense to you the listener; it establishes a framework. This is typically done with the drums. For example take a listen:

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That’s a basic drum pattern that will repeat over and over to help establish the beat. It goes kind of like:

boom boom bap, buh boom boom bap.

That pattern is repeated over and over. However each time that individual boom-bap pattern is played is called a metric cycle or a meter. These are also referred to as bars. The term refers to the act of drawing vertical line down the score after each measure.  The image below shows a typical music score and illustrates what the bar lines are and the bars (or measures):

The above image shows 3 bars, so that drum pattern would have been played three times. So play that drum pattern 16 times and you have 16 bars; or 16 of what has traditionally been called measures.

So looking back at our drum patter of: boom boom bap, buh boom boom bap:

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would fit into a score like such:

Taking it even further, let’s look at an actual rhyme from Wale off his More About Nothing mixtape (dope music if you haven’t already heard it).  On the track, The Soup he spits:

“Yeah, uh, where’s the love for the sixteen writers/

Who elevate the game when it was in need of a pilot?/

Who made a situation from what you see it’s a problem“

Each one of those lines represents a bar, so if we put it into musical notation on a score it would look like:

So there you have it, know you know what rappers mean when they talk about sixteen bars!