But the highly touted English band Temples is not merely influenced by the acid rock of yesteryear, it's consumed by it, and the group displayed its mastery of the aesthetic on its début album, "Sun Structures".
Its Leerdammer brand is the market leader in northern Europe, while in Britain this year the firm is demonstrating its mastery of what it calls "cheesemanship" by launching Maidwell, a new species of cheddar.
Two possibilities for testing a group are: one, to assess its mastery of content, and two, to sort it according to ability levels.
(Some of those I spoke to made the point that China had demonstrated its mastery of cyber espionage in the EP-3E incident, but it did not make overt use of it to wage cyber war).
Foxconn, headquartered in Taiwan, produces iPads and other gizmos efficiently in China because of the country's huge labour pool (it employs 270,000 people at its factory complex in Shenzhen) and its mastery of flexible production.
Its mastery of rock theatre was obvious.
I would also borrow from MoveOn its mastery of the internet for political purposes.
Rome's military superiority lay in its mastery of strategy, tactics, discipline, and military engineering.
What attracted Steven to the United States was its mastery of form.
"No Country for Old Men has been saluted for its mastery of mood," he writes.
I was also drawn to Rodney Jones's "Elegy for the Southern Drawl" for its mastery of narrative.
