Stanley Kubrick was one of the greatest American directors of all time. Almost every film he ever made was near the pinnacle of that film's genre. You can't talk about horror without mentioning the Shining, or science fiction without talking about 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dr. Stangelove is commonly considered one of the funniest, darkest films ever made. Can we apply his creative process to music?
I would like to point your attention to an unfinished project of his, one of his most infamous. Napoleon. During the pre-production of the film, he had his staff meticulously create a card catalog cross referencing, day by day, the entirety of Napoleon's life. At the time, it was the most complete, explicit bringing together of Napoleon-era history ever. This was a distillation of literally hundreds of books.
The same story exists for his other films. For The Shining, not only did he know the source material backwards and forwards, but he had his staff compile just about every ghost story ever, giving them the same treatment. When you watch The Shining, every shot is a culmination of that idiomatic knowledge, and the final product shows that influence explicitly.
It is my belief that, as a creative tool, TVTropes is the spiritual successor to Kubrick's card catalogs. A trot through the music page is something that, at least for myself, tends to result in a creativity spike. Obviously, this is not a place for technical discussion or even for hard theory, but to provide an organized, unified look at the ingrained language of modern music. Is there a musician you dig? Type em in and mash search. It's a super enlightening exercise.