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.