There's no percentage in being a music critic. The pay stinks and its one of the few professions where you're assured of brassing-off 50 percent of your readers with every review. Yet, at times, cosmic forces create meteors in the night sky in the form of artists transcending the ranks into global fame; seemingly right before our eyes. In those rare moments, critics rule.

The interesting commonality between two highly uncommonartists is their shared sobriquet "Lady." They've traveled different paths to their newfound super-star identity and couldn't be more disparate in the intonation and texture of their songs. Yet for all this obvious "difference" beneath the surface they share history worth noting. Risking a clich�, Lady Gaga seems a transubstantiation of Madonna sweeping to fame in the mid-eighties. Like an animated Picasso, Lady Gaga stormed American radio in 2008 with Just Dance and never looked back. Just know however this flame-throwing femme fatale is no fluke. Stefani Germanotta studied at New York's Convent of the Sacred heart before segueing to New York's Tisch School of the Arts at age 17. Lady Gaga was the upshot of her fondness for flamboyant glam-rockers like Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, and Madonna. By 2007, she was already making waves in Manhattan's club scene with her performance-art show.

From the "road-not-taken" comes the trinity now known as Lady Antebellum; arguably the first true Country mega-star candidates since Keith Urban or Kenny Chesney. Charles Kelley and David Haywood were classmates at the University of Georgia majoring in finance, not music. Topping off the tank, Kelley and Haywood found Hillary Scott, carrying show business DNA as the daughter of musicians Lang Scott and Linda Davis. Figuring their degree in finance could wait (though they'll likely need it), the threesome set out for Nashville to search for their validity in a heavy sea of competition. Nashville noticed.

The world at large loves to discover new stars and success stories. Patton was right, Americans  love a winner. Yet there is a widespread tendency midst our adoring throng to re-cast such people as unlikely Cinderella stories...rags to riches on a wing and a prayer. Usually when peeling back the veneer, truth is at odds with these fanciful legends. Super-stars seldom "fall-up."
 
In fact, there often exists a history of years of obscurity in the trenches. For example, myth would have it The Beatles were an overnight sensation; poof, instant Ed Sullivan Show and a string of Billboard number ones. In fact, The Beatles literally did somewhere around 10,000 hours of performance, many of which took place in gritty back alley clubs in places like Hamburg, Germany for 6 or 8 hours at a time. Only then were they discovered, deemed ready-for-prime-time by their handlers and the studios at Abbey Road.

The biographies of Lady Antebellum and Lady Gaga tell us a lot about these new stars; including their work ethic, vision, and some cosmic good fortune thrown in. Often when speaking to groups of aspiring media people, we remind them of our theory about ascending to massive success: it really isn't crowded at the top, if for no other reason than so few people are willing to pay the high tariff of the bone-numbing work it takes to get there. So, here's to the Ladies.