K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in
South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of
export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger
South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides
not only a history of South Korean popular music--the premodern
background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American
impact, and recent globalization--but also a description of K-pop as a
system of economic innovation and cultural production. In doing so, he
delves into the broader background of South Korea in this wonderfully
informed history and analysis of a pop culture phenomenon sweeping the
globe.