Kim's superbly crafted text is a worthy addition to the rapidly mushrooming literature on contemporary Korean pop music. Destined to be celebrated much as was her earlier account of theatre, film and everyday performance in North Korea, Illusive Utopia (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2010), her new account benefits from access to a rich, fluid and diverse research environment in, and beyond, her native South Korea. She has interviewed producers, performers and consumers, worked on a BuzzFeed video series on K-pop, as a journalist, and as a panelist at K-pop fan events. Her data is brought together within a framework grounded in cultural/critical studies, media studies, and performance/theatre studies. Her central theme is “liveness”. She explores how pop artists have been transformed since the beginning of the new millennium from singers to all-round entertainers. They are encountered primarily online but, in keeping with contemporary hyper-consumerism, much effort is expended to transform their 2D images viewed on an iPhone or computer screen into something more affective and intimate. Hence, she takes in Seoul's physical shrines to K-pop (SM Town and Klive), the development of hologram technology that renders distant idols as interactive, 3D, human beings, and the live concert scene. Concerts function as fan meetings rather than music performances. Being a fan requires considerable financial investment and, to our selfie generation, it involves self-promotion as tweeting and retweeting turns “the fleeting present into already documented memories from the past”, luring us “into the fuzzy matrix of liveness” (p. 202). However, fans are made involuntary actors by the manipulative workings of companies trying to maximize their own profits, while K-pop is used by the Korean government not in its own right, but as a way to spice up the exports of more mundane industrial products.

Korean pop music has become an international phenomenon. Although hardly considered in K-pop Live, foundations were laid in the early 1990s, as pop was transformed from a conservative local product by absorbing and assimilating genres ranging from rap through reggae to hip-hop. By 1996, it had begun to move from the aural – and the physical products of the recorded music industry – to visual spectacle, as the rise in satellite and cable TV encouraged dance routines within music videos. Multimedia companies began to create idols who would cater for both domestic and foreign consumers; they developed an intensive training system that taught singing, dancing, acting for the camera, foreign languages, and the cultivation of polite manners. Under restrictive contracts, idols had plastic surgery to hone their “perfect” bodies, before being given a shot at stardom. Korean pop's popularity spread, first to China and Japan, then to Southeast Asia, and in the last decade to the world.

Korean pop has often been theorized through considerations of globalization, hybridity, glocalization and cultural flows. Some have seen it as an attempt to make Korean culture hegemonic across the East Asian region. Korean Studies specialists have interpreted pop as an outgrowth of earlier cultural forms. Kim goes well beyond such perspectives, interpreting the technologies of digitization to account for success as much of the global music industry stalled. The downside to her approach is that she shifts attention away from K-pop as music, in the process critiquing the Berkeley-based scholar John Lie, and occasionally misinterpreting some of popular music's history. As a musicologist/ethnomusicologist, I must admit to a personal bias, since I, like many of us who write on pop, want to celebrate music. Many of us remain wedded to the idea of music as an aural phenomenon, and some of us are fearful of music being lost within the broader media industry. This is the context in which contributors to my edited text, Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2006), the first book-length discussion of pop in Korea, framed their discussions. However, Kim's focus on K-pop as idol pop essentially justifies her perspective, since to her K-pop excludes indie music, rock, metal, hip-hop and much more – genres that are celebrated by many musicologists/ethnomusicologists (including, notably, those who work on Japanese and Chinese pop).

K-pop as idol pop is a multimedia conglomeration of highly choreographed dance routines, strophic songs, dazzling costumes and plastic surgery. It is marked by a very public culture of fandom. As Kim puts it, “K-pop is an animal that thrives on excess … a fast-evolving machine, producing products that, like Kleenex, are used once and thrown away” (pp. 6–7). This comment intimates Adorno and Horkmeier's critique of popular culture, but also introduces the multiple “K”s that Kim uses to articulate her arguments. K-pop, then, is kaleidoscopic, because of its wide range; keypad, because it is accessed through the Internet; Kleenex, because it is highly disposable; ketchup, because it is predictable; korporate – following the Kardashians by substituting a ‘k’ for the initial ‘c’ – because of intense commodification within the neo-liberal economic system. Given connections across the region, and similarities to Euro-American bubble-gum pop of the 1970s and 1980s, the major “K” – “Korean” – can, of course, be open to challenge. There is, Kim reminds us, an alarming degree of uniformity characterizing global pop music, and this is shared by K-pop. Even “K-pop”, as a term, is not particularly Korean, but is based on terms used earlier for equivalents in Japan and Hong Kong. Still, Kim feels she must argue for Korean identity. To do so, she calls on Korean aesthetics, and in particular the feeling of heung. Heung, we are told, has no exact English counterpart (p. 17). It is notoriously fluid and amorphous (p. 195); a uniquely Korean mode of affect (p. 48); it links joy to liveness (p. 125). Her argument is unnecessarily nationalistic. It is also somewhat blinkered: foreign commentators have spent several decades deconstructing the claimed uniqueness in Korean aesthetics, and heung seems not dissimilar to craic in Ireland, taarab throughout the Middle East, or to the trance/ecstasy and altered states of consciousness that performers commonly report worldwide. My other quibbles concern the unnecessary inclusion, in brackets, of supposedly strict Romanizations of Korean personal names, too many pages devoted to a comparison of idol pop with Broadway productions, and the lack of awareness of the close – but shifting – relationship between live concerts and recordings in global pop since the 1960s. Let not these minor matters detract us, though: K-pop Live is essential reading, not least because it takes our understanding of K-pop into a new era, explaining what has become a global phenomenon as nobody else has done.