In the late 80’s I was in Singaore and watched some stupid cartoon with Malaysian sub titles (I think they were Malaysian). I thought “This will never catch on”. It was Mutant Ninja Teenage Turtles. Another great prediction.
My boyfriend and I have some Australian friends that are transplants here that got us into Flight of the Conchords a while back. Now you cant walk two feet without hearing people talking about how hilarious they are
I’ve never seen their appeal, to be honest. 
Seeing Tracey Chapman live in a coffee house raises your list into the WOW! stratosphere. (I assume she was performing)
Gosh, I’m not sure I have any good ones.
I met Jesse Jackson, but I was like 6, and it would have been 1980. I think the peak of his fame arc was before that, however.
My wife started pestering me to listen to this band, Panic! at the disco about 6 months before their single got HUGE.
My wife has a giant stack of books she had read then within a year of reading them would get picked for the Oprah book club. Funny stuff.
I was into Hard Science Fiction before all my friends, but I don’t think that counts either, as Niven et al were big long before I came along.
Cool, I’ve never been in “wow” territory before!
I knew about snowboards when they were known as “snurfers”, back when they were developed in my home town of Muskegon in the late 60s.
I was Country
When Country wasn’t cool
Lol
In the mid 80’s my father brought home a new game to play on the IBM 80 we had. The rules were in Russian so it took a while to learn how to play, but once I got going I was a Tetris champ.
Yeah, and only 15 years after Rites of Spring actually invented it!
Similarly, I loved Guster back when I was younger. I still do, but a little less. I think I got the first copies of their songs about 1997. Mostly from an older friend who’s sister had them, but no one my age had ever heard of them. We went to see them at Ohio Weslyan about two years ago, and it was pretty good. Glad I caught them before they lost the hand drums in the live show, at least.
My contribution, Maroon 5. I went to see Matchbox 20 and Sugar Ray in 01-02, but when I got there, they had an opening band I’d never heard of. I wasn’t too impressed by this band, but they were familiar-sounding. They didn’t say the name, but there was a bed sheet with a name painted on it. When they were leaving the stage, they talked about their new CD that would be coming out, and that they were this band called Maroon 5.
Sometime afterward, I fell asleep watching VH1, and woke up to hear “Harder to Breathe.” - “Hmm,” I thought, “this is familiar sounding.” Turns out, I’d seen them in concert before…six months later everyone I know was talking about this great new band.
Brendon Small
I’m not sure if this counts, because I don’t know how popular they are with the mainstream folks, but I knew about Against me! maybe 5 or 6 years ago, and now they’ve got videos on MTV. I’ve seen them at little dive bars with a crowd of maybe 100 people, and now they’re touring Europe and shit. Of course, now I think they suck huge donkey balls (White People for Peace is IMO the worst over-produced, watered-down kind of radio rock crap I’ve ever heard (apologies to fans) considering their older stuff like Pints of Guinness Make You Strong).
But the kicker is that the slightly chubby guitarist/backup vocalist, James? I remember when they called him Pig Nuts and his band The Scams played local punk venues every other weekend. This was about 8 or 10 years ago.
I picked up a strange book called Fight Club when it first hit the shelves. I’d never heard of the author before, but I loved it beyond words. Then I snapped up copies for all my friends.
I’ve been to several Guster concerts in the last few years and the hand drums are still very much a part of the show.
I was into Harry Potter several months before any one I know, but Philosopher’s Stone had been out for over a year in the UK by the time it appeared as Sorceror’s Stone in my local Costco and caught my mom’s eye. (I’d been complaining that I’d read all the books I’d liked and couldn’t find any more.) So, it was before almost everyone in America (I remember searching online to see if there was a sequel yet, and there were few enough search results that other people named “Harry Potter” were appearing in the first several pages of results.
I even tried to get my friends to join a fan club I tried to invent, but they all thought I was a weirdo. Six months later, they were convinced I was weird since I wasn’t reading the book and everyone else in class was. They didn’t even believe me that I’d read it six months before, even though my copy was falling apart from being read multiple times.
Gotta say it:
BACON SALT
Thanks to this board, I was an early consumer, and got a great story out of it as well. (Plus a handwritten note from Dave that will surely be worth a bundle someday.)
Pokemon. I was into it way before the little kids.
A friend mentioned to me that I always seem to know about movies years before they’re even made!
This is, of course, hyperbole, but if it’s from a comic book, it has been the case that I have or had the original. *A History of Violence, Ghost World, V for Vendetta…*now they’re filming Dark Knight in Chicago. I watched them shoot an asassination scene on LaSalle St. just last week! And this was not something I knew about in advance.
I also saw Suzanne Vega at UC-Boulder a few months before she made it big. A friend was working security and got me backstage, and Suzanne herself gave me a Heineken!
I saw Ani DiFranco at my college with an audience of less than 30 people before she became more well known.
I was also pretty much the first one in my peer group to be using the internet, and MUDs/MUSHes.