I've tried pinning down the past several decades to their most prominent musical trends

hm. this makes me think about ai feeback loops and how when ai gets ai data to train on the output it quickly turns into useless junk or 'slop'. but for human influences various blues -> serveral later bands including led zeppelin -> many others including slash/guns and roses and you can kinda hear the influence... but it doesn't (usually, at least) turn into slop.

If it doesn't really matter that people like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino invented rock and roll in the 50s, one could pin down everything after that any way you want