With all the talk about "nasty woman" since its utterance in the third and final presidential debate before the 2016 election, I decided to see 1) what the general distribution of the term nasty is in the lyrics of some of the most popular American music in the last 65 years, in terms of overall frequency, collocations, and chronology, and 2) whether the collocation nasty woman appears at all in these lyrics.

On the first matter, a look at the lyrics from the 650 songs populating Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015) reveals only 11 uses of the word in 7 songs, and all of these between 1989 ("My Prerogative") and 2015 ("Blank Space"). A search for the word in the 1,950 songs from Billboard's year-end Top 30 charts reveals only 15 hits in 11 songs, with only one appearing earlier than the aforementioned "My Prerogative" ("Bad Moon Rising" in 1969), and the remainder occurring in 4 songs in the 1990s, 2 in the 2000s, and 2 in the 2010s.

With respect to the second question, there is no use of the collocate nasty woman in the Top 30 collection. Interestingly, nasty man does occur once in one song in the early '90s ("Freak Me"). Other collocations that occur are nasty weather (in the aforementioned "Bad Moon Rising"), nasty thoughts ("Baby Got Back"), nasty things ("Return of the Mack"), and nasty scar (in the aforementioned "Blank Space"). 

We'll have to return to this question in a couple years and see if phrases like "nasty woman" or others that were used on the political trails leading up to the 2016 election make an appearance on the Billboard charts.

And, of course, can't write on the word nasty without including a video of this song, for my sister Alicia and my acquaintance Sandy.

As always, thanks to Dr. Clayton Darwin for providing the KwicKwic tool, which makes work like this possible.