About

Pope Bars, often used in its hashtag form #PopeBars, refers to user-created rhymes that accompany a photograph of Pope Francis where he is holding a modern wireless microphone in a manner that emulates the manner of Rap / Hip Hop performers. In Fall 2015, these types of rhymes were often posted on Twitter.

Origin

On Monday, November 30th, Pope Francis toured Bangui, which is the capital of the Central African Republic, where he urged the people to reconcile a long-held civil war. During his visit, he was photographed by Gianluigi Guercia in a photograph that was then distributed by Getty Images to newspapers and publications worldwide. ^[1]

Bars is a term used to refer to rhyming lyrics in rap or hip hop.^[10]

Spread

Black Twitter users began tweeting the hashtag/lyric combination at around 5:45 AM, Eastern Standard Time, and some notable tweets, including those by users thvpelo^[2] and JussDaTip,^[3] receiving in the thousands and hundreds of retweets and favorites, respectively. Within 15 hours, the hashtag had been used more than 66,000 times on Twitter.^[4] The trend quickly received notice by the mainstream media, including articles in Vanity Fair,^[5] Vibe,^[6] and Mashable.^[7]

FLOTUS Bars

On December 10th, 2015, Michelle Obama made a guest appearance on a parodic music video with College Humor about going to college. The short gained over 188,000 views in less than 24 hours.

A still from the video, where Obama is seen singing into a microphone, began going viral on Twitter under the hashtag #FLOTUSBars. In less than 24 hours, more than 3,000 tweets were posted.^[11]

Pope Bars Revival

On April 30th, 2017, Reuters^[12] tweeted an image of Pope Francis aboard his plane speaking into a microphone, warning against an American conflict with North Korea (shown below).

The tweet immediately reminded people of the original Pope Bars meme. Twitter user @LJPMcCloughlin^[13] tweeted that because the Pope holds his mic close to his mouth with one hand and gestures with the other, it can look like he's rapping (shown below).

Meanwhile, Twitter users paired the picture with rap lyrics, making Pope Francis look like he's rapping, as they did in the first wave of the Pope Bars meme. The spread of these jokes was covered by a Twitter Moment^[14] the next day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Note: Search results were not available for popebars as all one word, which is how it's usually used, however there were minimal results for the two words separately.

External References