I just replied to e-mail about one of my cultural references ("Super Green"). I enjoy sprinkling cultural references throughout a story, and there will be more, some explained explicitly, some not.
Counting all of the music references as one in chapter 4, there's at least nine cultural references in the first four chapters.
Of course many of them are quite old, so I'm showing my age.
Darrien's thoughts and words on music in chapter 4 is close to my own taste (whereas a whole lot of other aspects of Darrien are nowhere near to me in real life).
One of my favorite genres to read is hard-boiled detective fiction, or variations on it. So similes are a must. They can be hard to come up with, specially compared to some of the classic brilliant lines ("A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window").
But there's a few in this story I'm proud of: "quicker than a gecko's blink" is my favorite so far. Later on I use "a cello short of a string quartet" but I don't think it's that creative (and it may be one I have heard somewhere else).