Psychedelic rock is huge right now.

This month in Los Angeles, we’ve seen Dead Meadow, Black Mountain and Wooden Shjips performing noted gigs. The churning, lugubrious riffing and meditative psychological plateaus the genre brings are clearly reaching out to listeners and finding a home.

All of this brings up the point that psychedelic rock has already been huge – its heyday was in the late ’60s with performers like Jimi Hendrix, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Jefferson Airplane. Needless to say, any sort of rediscovery of a musical sound involves tweaking the original, but the phenomenon raises the question of why it’s back.

In order for the new installment of psychedelic music to deserve that name, the musical tools that were present in the original must be present in the newer versions as well. What I mean is that the chords, textures, instrumentation, song structures and playing styles will all be reminiscent of the original – which is exactly why we can use the term psychedelic rock to describe the complete product. When music is part of a given genre, something about it is determined by that classification.

So why the recent popularity, if the music itself is largely the same?

It’s possible that it is this style of music’s very absence that made the revival come about in the first place. After watching the guitar solo fade and glamour replace headbands full of LSD, maybe the time is just right; people wanted a change, and psychedelic rock fit the bill. Maybe people want something harder to listen to than cute, lo-fi indie bands or serotonin-deprived balladeering.

Whether or not this is the answer, it brings up the point that often what makes music popular is not the sounds themselves but some extra-musical elements, like the music’s context or stylistic branding. This is because the tools that performers use to sound like rock are limited. There are, in a sense, only so many ways to use the musical elements that sound like rock; there are only so many ways to recombine them into new songs. And for this reason, a lot of new songs aren’t actually that new at all. A given rock riff will most likely have a counterpart in some other song from another rock band, whether the groups are contemporaries or not.

This sort of thinking has most likely encouraged some to think of a lot of rock music as unoriginal, but to do that misses the point. There’s no harm done with a little recycling when there are other parts of the music to consider. I recently saw Black Lips at the El Rey, and if I can think of an example of repackaging the tried and true riffs, I think they are the perfect one. But what makes them interesting is the repackaging itself, not the notes in isolation. When they cleverly, and lightly, but not sardonically, discuss holy war in their song “Veni Vidi Vici,” or when they whip the room into a flower-punk frenzy, the reason for all the buzz comes out.

I’m not arguing that rock can be boiled down to some onstage experiment with bodily fluids, or that antics should supplant music, just that the thing that makes a band like Black Lips, or the psychedelic groups mentioned above, work has to do with the force of personality and with the fact that they make something old make sense now.

It works, and it sounds great, but for originality the right place to look probably won’t have such a convenient branding.