"Allow a hundred flowers to bloom, a hundred schools of thought to dispute." Such was the slogan of the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956 that, like so many other times in the history of the People's Republic of China, behind the initial promise of a democratization of criticism of the Party, it concealed a settling of accounts among its various bureaucratic factions and ended in the ideological hunt for the supposed heretics. Schools of thought alluded to science, flowers, writers and artists. Not in China but in much of the rest of the world, hundreds of thousands of shoots would sprout at the same time, in this case musical, in the heat of the burning sun of ideologies, at the precise moment when so many intellectuals were determined to decree their end. . The Cold War, the new societies of the influx, the fight for the civil rights of African-Americans, the end of the colonial empires, the student rebellions, the contradictions of the counterculture, the difficulties of the Welfare State, the oil crisis and the new political realism of the eighties would frame a prodigal period in sound innovations and social experiments. And music would configure a terrain as valid as any other to trace the excessive hopes and the unfulfilled promises, the utopian glimpses and the stark realities, the effervescence of the present, the nostalgias of a fleeting past and the expectations of a more promising future. It is not the backdrop, this of the post-war European and American societies, but the very principle that articulates the attempt to understand a wide and flexible set of musical manifestations that would contribute to the metamorphosis of a pop (rock?) that already accumulates six decades of accelerated evolution. From doo wop and light song to krautrock and Swedish prog, from Czechoslovak underground to Argentine rock, from European free improvisation to post-industrial, from British counterculture to German electronics, this compilation aims to draw a modest fresco - made of partial revelations, of ephemeral triumphs and legendary failures - of a time that, although irremissibly past, is not without lessons for our own present.