In addition to singing and dancing, the idols study acting and foreign languages—Japanese, Chinese, and English. They also receive media coaching and are readied for the intense scrutiny they will receive on the Internet from the “netizens” of Korea, the most wired country on earth. (“Netizens Love Seohyun’s Aegyo Mark” declared a recent headline from the K-pop Web site Soompi, regarding the small beauty dot to the left of the singer’s eye.) Unless you’re the Jonas Brothers or Taylor Swift, public drunkenness, brawling, and serial misbehavior can often enhance an artist’s reputation in the American pop scene; in Korea, a rumored sex tape or a positive test for marijuana can derail a career. On average, only one in ten trainees makes it all the way to a début.

The groups are put together by the heads of the agencies, according to an alchemy of individual and collective qualities. “The members of a group shouldn’t be completely alike and indistinguishable,” Melody Kim, a community manager at Soompi, told me, “but they should be complementary enough so that together they form a really great, cohesive whole.” Groups début on one of the many musical-variety shows that play on Korean TV almost nightly. I went to the taping of one, for the Mnet musical program “M! Countdown,” where new and established groups perform their latest songs and the audience votes for its favorites; I was reminded of the days when MTV actually featured music. If idols are successful, they are often expected to churn out a full album every eighteen months or so and a five-song mini album each year. The charts change rapidly, and, because youth and novelty are at such a premium, established groups usually don’t last long: five years is the average shelf life of an idol. (Some idols extend their careers by acting in K-dramas.) New groups appear regularly; in 2011, about sixty groups made débuts, an unprecedented number. Only a fraction are likely to last; most will fade away after a couple of songs.

In its early years, the Korean Wave didn’t feel as imperialistic to other Asians as a Chinese wave might have. But more recently, in Japan and in some parts of China, there has been a backlash from a loud minority, which may be one reason that the agencies are promoting their groups more assiduously in the West. This year, China passed a law limiting the amount of foreign programming that can be shown on Chinese TV. Hallyu, far from seeming like a benign export from a nonthreatening country, is now commonly described as an “invasion,” as though it were a sort of mental Asian carp that is clogging up the minds of the young.

Good looks are a K-pop artist’s stock-in-trade. Although some of the idols are musicians, K-pop artists rarely play instruments onstage. Where K-pop stars excel is in sheer physical beauty. Their faces, chiselled, sculpted, and tapering to a sharp point at the chin, Na’vi style, look strikingly different from the flat, round faces of most Koreans. Some were born with this bone structure, no doubt, but many can look this way only with the help of plastic surgery. Korea is by far the world leader in procedures per capita, according to The Economist. Double-fold-eyelid surgery, which makes eyes look more Western, is a popular reward for children who get good marks on school exams. The popularity of the K-pop idols has also brought Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean “medical tourists” to Seoul to have their faces altered to look more like the Korean stars. Some hotels have partnered with hospitals so that guests can have in-house procedures; the Ritz-Carlton Seoul, for example, offers an eighty-eight-thousand-dollar “anti-aging beauty package.” Women come to have their cheekbones shaved down and undergo “double jaw surgery,” in which the upper and lower jawbones are cracked apart and repositioned, to give the whole skull a more tapered look.

These Grand Guignol images were on my mind in Anaheim, at the meet-the-idols press briefing before the show, which took place in a long, narrow room on the third floor of the Honda Center. Two idols from each of the six groups who were performing filed in. They sat on high stools on a small raised platform. Each was wearing one of the many different costumes that he or she would sport in the course of the four-hour show. The boys’ faces were as pancaked and painted as the girls’, and their hair was even more elaborately moussed, gelled, and dyed, in blond and butterscotch hues. Some guys wore high-waisted jackets with loose harem pants or jodhpurs, circus-ringmaster style; others wore white cutaways with high, stiff collars and black ties, like dream prom dates. They were more androgynous than Ziggy Stardust. The girls wore gold hot pants or short skirts, sparkly tops, and lace-up leather boots. Everyone looked very serious.

Once the idols were seated, a woman appeared with a stack of white gym towels. She gave one to each of the female idols, who arranged it atop her exposed thighs, as a makeshift modesty panel. I sat opposite Sooyoung, of Girls’ Generation, a willowy brunette. She seemed distant and frosty, like a figurine in a glass case.

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S.M. had prepared questions for the idols, and they were read out loud, in English and Korean, by the S.M. company man who ran the proceedings. The first question, for the two members of the Girls, was: “Every time you visit the States it seems like you receive crazy love and support. Can you feel it? Can you explain the wonderful reception your fans have given you?”

The same question was put, in slightly different forms, to all the groups. The two representatives of Super Junior, a twelve-member boy group, were asked, “How do you always manage to have an explosive reaction from your fans worldwide? What’s your secret?”

One of the members hazarded a guess. “Maybe it is because of our great good looks?”

Lee Soo-man, S.M.’s founder—people in the company refer to him as Chairman Lee—is K-pop’s master architect. Lee retired as the agency’s C.E.O. in 2010, but he still takes a hand in forming the trainees into idol groups, including S.M.’s newest one, EXO. The group has twelve boys, six of them Korean speakers who live in Seoul (EXO-K) and six Mandarin speakers, who live in China (EXO-M). The two “subgroups” release songs at the same time in their respective countries and languages, and promote them simultaneously, thereby achieving “perfect localization,” as Lee calls it. “It may be a Chinese artist or a Chinese company, but what matters in the end is the fact that it was made by our cultural technology,” he has said. “We are preparing for the next biggest market in the world, and the goal is to produce the biggest stars in the world.” But, while S.M. gets credit for inventing the factory system, its idol groups are seen by some as being too robotic to make it in the West. Y.G. is significantly smaller than S.M. in terms of revenue, but it has a reputation as an agency that allows artists like PSY a kind of creative freedom they would not enjoy at S.M.

Lee was born in Seoul in 1952, during the Korean War. He grew up listening to his mother play classical piano. At the time, the dominant Korean pop genre was trot (an abbreviation of “foxtrot”), pronounced “teuroteu.” Trot borrowed from Western music and from Japanese popular songs, a legacy of the Japanese occupation, from 1910 to 1945. It blended these influences with a distinctively Korean singing style called p’ansori. Lee, however, immersed himself in American folk and Korean rock music, which started on U.S. Army bases and was popularized by the guitarist and singer Shin Joong-hyun, in the sixties. Long before K-pop came along, Korean musicians were masters at combining Western influences with traditional singing and dancing styles.

Lee made his name as a folksinger, and toward the end of the decade formed a short-lived hard-rock band called Lee Soo-man and the 365 Days. He also became a well-known d.j. and the host of televised music and variety shows. Mark Russell, who interviewed Lee for his 2008 book, “Pop Goes Korea,” writes that the Korean government cracked down on the music scene, arresting and imprisoning several prominent musicians on pot charges. When a military coup installed Chun Doo-hwan as President, in 1980, Lee’s radio and TV shows were cancelled.

Lee moved to the U.S., where he pursued a master’s degree in computer engineering at California State University, in Northridge. He became fascinated with the music videos that were a staple of programming on the newly launched MTV. If there is a single video from the eighties that captures many of the elements that later resurfaced in K-pop, it is Bobby Brown’s 1988 hit “My Prerogative,” with its triplet swing on the sixteenth note, a signature of New Jack Swing. Brown’s dance moves—a swagger in the hips, combined with tight spins that are echoed by backing dancers—also found their way into K-pop’s DNA.

In 1985, Lee received his degree, and, he told Russell, he returned home determined to “replicate U.S. entertainment in Korea.” Increasing prosperity, marked by the arrival of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, helped bring market-oriented democracy to South Korea and a general loosening of restrictions on the media. Around this time, Koreans coming back to Seoul from the U.S. brought the rhythms of rap and hip-hop, sung in Korean. The consonant nature of the language, with its abundance of ka and ta sounds, lent a hard-edged quality to the raps. In 1992, a three-member boy group called Seo Taiji and Boys performed a rap song on a Korean-TV talent competition, to the horror of the judges, who ranked them last, and to the delight of the kids watching at home (one of the Boys was Yang Hyun-suk, the future founder of Y.G. Entertainment). Korean music historians generally cite this performance as the beginning of K-pop.

Lee founded S.M. in 1989. His first success was a Korean singer and hip-hop dancer named Hyun Jin-young, whose album came out in 1990. But, just as Jin-young was on the verge of stardom, he was arrested for drugs. Russell writes that Lee was “devastated” by this misfortune, and that the experience taught him the value of complete control over his artists: “He could not go through the endless promoting and developing a new artist only to have it crash and burn around him.”

In effect, Lee combined his ambitions as a music impresario with his training as an engineer to create the blueprint for what became the K-pop idol assembly line. His stars would be made, not born, according to a sophisticated system of artistic development that would make the star factory that Berry Gordy created at Motown look like a mom-and-pop operation. Lee called his system “cultural technology.” In a 2011 address at Stanford Business School, he explained, “I coined this term about fourteen years ago, when S.M. decided to launch its artists and cultural content throughout Asia. The age of information technology had dominated most of the nineties, and I predicted that the age of cultural technology would come next.” He went on, “S.M. Entertainment and I see culture as a type of technology. But cultural technology is much more exquisite and complex than information technology.”

In 1996, S.M. débuted its first idol group: a five-member boy band called H.O.T. (short for High-Five of Teenagers). It was followed by S.M.’s first girl group, S.E.S., after the given names of the three members (Sea, Eugene, and Shoo). Both groups were enormously popular in Korea, and inspired other groups. Soon K-pop was pushing both traditional trot and rock to the commercial margins of the Korean music scene.

In 1998, Lee began expanding into the rest of Asia. The idols sang in Japanese and Chinese, but the sound and style of the music and the videos adhered to the principles that had made them popular in Korea. Lee and his colleagues produced a manual of cultural technology—it’s known around S.M. as C.T.—that catalogued the steps necessary to popularize K-pop artists in different Asian countries. The manual, which all S.M. employees are instructed to learn, explains when to bring in foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in what country; the precise color of eyeshadow a performer should wear in a particular country; the exact hand gestures he or she should make; and the camera angles to be used in the videos (a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree group shot to open the video, followed by a montage of individual closeups).

C.T. seemed to work. By the late nineties, H.O.T. was topping charts in China and Taiwan. Both H.O.T. and S.E.S. disbanded in the early two-thousands, but Lee’s follow-up acts proved to be even more popular. BoA, a solo female singer who made her début in 2000, became huge in Japan. Super Junior, the boy group, débuted in 2005, and became bigger throughout Asia than H.O.T. had been. And in 2007 came Girls’ Generation, the nine-member group that represented cultural technology in its highest form, designed to conquer not only Asia but the West as well. Nikkei, the Japanese business magazine, put the group on the cover in 2010, suggesting that Girls’ Generation was the next Samsung.

Neil Jacobson is a thirty-five-year-old executive in the A. & R. department at Interscope Records, one of Universal Music Group’s labels, who is in charge of making Girls’ Generation’s début American album. When I met him, in his large corner office at Interscope’s headquarters, in Santa Monica, he was dressed in jeans and a gray knit hoodie. Jacobson has unusually large eyes, and he has a habit of standing close and training his orbs on you, encouraging you to ponder the mind-boggling import of the point he is making.

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Jacobson said that he had met Chairman Lee in Hong Kong, and that they attended a Girls’ Generation show together. “It blew my mind how conceptual he is!” Jacobson exclaimed, giving me his wide-eyed look. “Every little thing is thought out. Every song is like a mini epic! And the fans—oh, my God!” He paused, slightly staggered by the memory.

Jacobson’s challenge is to put together an album that highlights the Girls’ Koreanness—the distinctive sweetness and purity that sets them apart from other pop acts—while making the music urban-sounding enough to get on the radio and be embraced by, say, Nicki Minaj or Rihanna, who could introduce the K-pop sound and style to their fans. The rapper and producer Swizz Beatz has spoken of wanting to pair Chris Brown with Y.G.’s BIGBANG, a five-member boy group, and Nicki Minaj with the agency’s other big success, 2NE1, a fashion-forward four-member girl group. “Bridging the gaps with collaborations can be the start of a global phenomenon,” he told the music magazine The Fader. But so far only PSY has come close to bridging the East-West pop-culture divide, and it remains to be seen whether his success will be a one-time phenomenon, like that of the other Asian star to reach the top of the U.S. charts singing in his or her native tongue, the Japanese crooner Kyu Sakamoto, whose song “Sukiyaki” topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963.

The directive to make a Girls’ Generation album for the U.S. market came from on high. Max Hole, an executive at Universal’s international division, told me, “I keep close tabs on what’s happening in Japan, so of course I was aware that Girls’ Generation had become monstrously huge there, and they do these amazing synchronized dances—a very visual act—and I thought the songs were great. So, at one of our meetings which the heads of all the North American divisions attended, I played Girls’ Generation for them. And Jimmy Iovine”—Interscope’s chairman—“said, ‘These are really good records.’ And the decision was made that we should try Girls’ Generation in America.”

Like everyone else in the record industry, Hole wants to do business in China, which one day will be the world’s biggest market. The question is when that will be. When I asked Hole, he said, “China is obviously a huge opportunity for us in five to ten years’ time.” He added, “Right now, the market is so small, but we make money on endorsements and touring.” Collaborating with S.M. on a U.S. record for Girls could lead to other collaborations in China, where S.M. is better connected than Universal.