Zepp

I recently made a friend's jaw drop by admitting to him that I was pretty unfamiliar with Led Zeppelin's music, apart from the standards that get played to death on the radio.
I realized that I had to fix this, so I scraped together every album of theirs I could find, and committed myself to listening to it all. And ho-ly SMOKES... can I say I get it now? Luke, are you reading this? I'm thinking of you as I write it, bud.
I mean, I grew up hearing this music - my folks listened to it; I'd hear it at work; it was the crap the older guys listened to. I came of age in the 80's, so "my kind of music" was anything (I now understand) more or less directly derived from punk. I remember Robert Plant playing on the radio, and I'm sorry, but it was awful -- or at least I thought so at the time (maybe I'll change my mind on that at some point).
Anyway, so back to Led Zeppelin: I'm not going to try to talk them up to anyone who hasn't heard them. Either you've heard them and don't like them (I'm not going to convince you otherwise); you've heard them and do like them (again: I'm NOT going to convince you otherwise); or you've heard the few of their songs that get flogged to death on the radio. If you're one of the last group, and you don't get what all the fuss is about, grab their first album, carve out some time, and listen to the album at least once through uninterrupted.

Something similar to this has happened to me with Eric Clapton (and Cream and Derek and the Dominoes), The Allman Brothers, The Who, David Bowie, in roughly that order.
I've never really gotten the hype around the Rolling Stones. Maybe I'll see the light on them someday ;-)

Supergreg

It just hit me that Supergreg (#1), one of the first "Internet memes" to catch my attention, was played by none other than Sacha Baron Cohen. That's the last nail in the coffin of my secret hope that there really was such a dumbass. Damn you Lee Jeans, for taunting me so!