Trent Reznor gets a CMA nomination for "Old Town Road"

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When one thinks of the throbbing, depressive music of Nine Inch Nails, only one thing comes to mind: adorable bucktoothed Disney characters. Now, Disney has apparently caught on to this underlying current in the band’s music, as they’ve asked NIN masterminds Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to score their new movie with Pixar, titled Soul.

According to Variety, the film “imagines that every person on earth comes pre-installed with a soul formed and perfected in a cosmic realm. Jamie Foxx will play a middle-school music teacher on earth who dreams of playing at legendary New York jazz club The Blue Note. After the wrong step into an open sewer grate, Joe slips back into his soul form back in the other realm — with some existential work to do before he might land his big gig.”

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A new study of four decades of country hits suggests that the idiom's notion of what it means to be a man is shifting—and not in a healthy way.

Analyzing the chart-topping country songs from the 1980s through the 2010s, Mississippi State University sociologist Braden Leap pinpoints two troubling trends.

In recent years, Leap reports, country hits have "increasingly depicted women as sexual objects instead of employed equals." In addition, "whiteness is celebrated far more often than it was in the 1980s and 1990s"—a trend that dovetails with the rise of white identity politics, particularly in the rural areas where the genre is most popular.

"Contemporary country celebrates heterosexual men in blue-collar occupations just like the genre did in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s," Leap writes in the journal Rural Sociology. "But the ideal rural man is now depicted as a particular type of heterosexual provider, while white women have increasingly been represented as the ideal sexual objects to complement this masculinity."

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