I was thinking about the ACADEMY AWARDS' new diversity/inclusion standards (which, if I'm reading the room correctly, some of you think is a great idea and some of you don't) and wondering if there might be a GRAMMY equivalent. Thought #1: Diversity and inclusion should be encouraged and rewarded. Engineering and production jobs and cello-playing and mastering jobs and coffee-making and management jobs should be open to everybody, and if that requires outside intervention, there should be outside intervention. But, thought #2: Diversity and inclusion generally require that there be teams and departments and/or themes and narratives, none of which are needed to make, say, a pop album. The album may be just you and your brother composing, performing, producing and mixing. It may not have a narrative. You might get your own coffee. You might not even have a brother. It could be just you, your laptop, your rhyming dictionary and your BANDCAMP account. You may or may not have a record company behind you, and while you probably, if you're on the Grammy Awards' radar, have management and promotion and other such support, you are by no means required to, and you may not have much need for interns and production assistants either. How does an academy create hiring standards for an art form that may or may not involve any hiring? Thought #3: If you can't force the potential nominees to diversify, maybe you can do something about the nominators. And the RECORDING ACADEMY, to its credit, is in fact taking action on that side of things. The Academy's ongoing (and, admittedly, awkward) effort to diversify its own house has included promises to make its nominating committees and its overall voting membership more inclusive. As women, people of color and other traditionally excluded groups gain a louder voice in the process, one hopes the nominees and winners on future Grammy nights will increasingly look—and actually be—diverse and inclusive. And more representative of the music being celebrated. The Academy could push change at the Grammys even faster by instituting ranked-choice voting, which its own diversity task force said it should do but the Academy, with no explanation, rejected last year. It also could speed up its membership drive. Just under half the membership invitations sent out this year went to women and 21 percent went to African Americans, which, mathematically speaking, is no way to shake up your membership with any kind of quickness. *Most* of the invitations should be going to underrepresented groups. Which shouldn't be hard in pop music. And yet. Thought #4: Instead of instituting rules on a project-by-project basis, could the Academy simply tell labels they can't submit *anything* for Grammy consideration if the label itself doesn't meet certain diversity goals?.... Speaking of exclusion, what's the industry doing about this blow to touring artists trying to get to the US from other countries?... FACEBOOK LIVE is about to get a little (a lot?) more music-unfriendly... A good year for guitars and performance rights orgs. A good week for vinyl... His older brother, ROBERT "KOOL" BELL, is the one the band was named after, so you'd be forgiven if you thought RONALD "KHALIS" BELL was the lesser of the two brothers at the heart of KOOL & THE GANG, just the tenor saxophone player or something. In reality, not unlike AC/DC's MALCOLM YOUNG, Khalis was the creative one hiding in the shadows, the driving force behind some of the biggest pop hits of the '70s and '80s as a songwriter, arranger, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He was modest about his accomplishments—"a lot of the songs, I may have spearheaded ’em, but it’s really, with a ‘K,’ the kollective genius of a band called Kool & the Gang," he said when the brothers and two bandmates were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame—but not unaware of his phenomenal range, which spanned jazz, funk, R&B, pop and even hints of gospel over the decades. As one does when one grows up with one's father's MILES DAVIS records, but also with Davis himself (he was friends with the Bells' boxer dad), and gets one's start shuttling between playing Greenwich Village bars and the APOLLO in the late 1960s. A musical life well-lived. RIP.