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.