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I recently had a conversation with my music-snob roommate about the history of pop music. What I realized over the course of the conversation is that it's incredibly difficult to deal in absolutes when you're talking about pop music. It's next to impossible to speak in terms like "the best." Various sources have named everything from "Stairway to Heaven" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason to Stay Here" as the best song ever. It's just not a very easy thing to do.
The other thing I realized is that there is one absolute in popular music - that "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang is the most influential song of the past 75 years.
The Gang is by no means the most influential pop artist or group of the past 75 years - that would probably be Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry - but until the New Jersey trio released their 14-minute magnum opus in 1979, popular music meant rock and roll or some derivative thereof.
Nowadays, pop music is split into two groups: hip-hop and rock, with few artists, OutKast and The Roots among them, blurring the line between the two. Before "Rapper's Delight," rap and hip-hop were insignificant counterculture genres that most white people had never heard of. Artists like Gil Scott-Heron only came to prominence later. Once "Rapper's Delight" went gold, everything began to change.
Without the Sugarhill Gang, there would be no Tupac, no N.W.A., no Will Smith, no Eminem, no 50 Cent, no Kanye West. Don't like any of those artists?
The effects of Sugarhill Gang's breaking rap into the mainstream are further-reaching than you might think. Think about it this way: If there's no "Rapper's Delight," there's no hip-hop. Without hip-hop, New Kids on the Block would lose a major influence. From there, the boy bands of the 1990s would not have existed, and, by extension, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, Maroon 5 and other various, sundry acts that we take for granted may or may not have anything to do with rap as we consider it.
The influence of rap on modern pop can be likened to the influence of country blues on early jazz and rock and roll. While blues was once an arcane, very racially centered form of music, it influenced jazz and later rock indelibly once people like Berry and Presley had the wherewithal to put the two together.
In the same vein, mainstream rap is not only important in and of itself - and its importance cannot be overemphasized in artistic, social and political terms - it's important in the sense that it has left a mark on all other pop music.
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