In this post, I take a look at instances of the word coast in pop music, specifically those cases in which it refers to the edge of land near a large body of water. To do so, I ran the words coast (and its morphological variants) and seaboard on lyrics of songs making up Billboard's year-end Top Thirty charts (1951-2016). The results were 39 hits in 12 songs from the collection.

Of the search terms that were used, only the bare form coast was found in the collection. I divided the instances of this word into two categories: generic references and proper nouns. The generic references represented the smaller of the two sets, with "American Pie" and "No Scrubs" including one token apiece, and two tokens appearing in the following:

Among the proper nouns, there is one reference to Gold Coast in "Brown Sugar" and two instances of Golden Coast, apparently in reference to America's West Coast in this song:

The remaining songs (n=9) include references only to the East Coast and the West Coast (there were no references to the Left Coast, Third Coast, Gulf Coast, etc.). Three songs refer to the East Coast only ("Motownphilly", "Soldier", "Low Life"), and three to the West Coast only ("My Life", "How Do You Want It/California Love", "California Gurls"). The last three songs of the group include references to both East Coast and West Coast:

Finally, a couple bonuses:

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