National Post (National Edition)
K-Pop with a B.C. twist
S. Korean video shot entirely in Metro Vancouver
With locations including the Stanley Park seawall, a retro garage and an eerily empty White Rock pier, South Korea’s newest K-Pop hit features a music video filmed entirely in Metro Vancouver.
Likey, by the nine-member girl group Twice, features a who’s who of Vancouver’s most Instagram-worthy locations. There’s a gelato shop, the Gastown steam clock, a street of surprisingly expensive McMansions, a SkyTrain car, Angel clothing store and Steveston’s Marine Garage, which still features a pair of vintage gas pumps out front.
To the keen viewer, there is a banner advertising an upcoming Terry Fox Run, a company vehicle for Vancouver’s Red Truck Beer and the fact that the group appears to have obtained the permits to seal off Gastown’s normally traffic-heavy Maple Tree Square.
The White Rock pier makes a notable appearance, with a shot perfectly timed to show a passing freight train. A well-known Gastown alley, which can normally have a pretty strong urine stench, briefly makes an appearance as an appropriately gritty dance backdrop.
The song is set to tear up K-Pop charts. Within hours of its posting to YouTube on Monday, the song had already racked up one-Vancouver’s worth of viewers. As of press time, the song had 3.3 million views, with tens of thousands more being added every second.
Carrying the Anglicized chorus “Me Likey Likey Likey,” the song is all about attempting to woo a social media “like” from a paramour.
“Pose for the camera, aren’t I pretty. When you see this, make a smile, and press hard on that cute red heart down there,” reads the English subtitles on the song’s official video.
According to eagle-eyed Twice fans who spotted the group in Vancouver, the video appears to have been filmed in early September.
Shooting a video of any kind in Vancouver is nothing new, of course, but the video for Likey may have also been a nod to the city’s emerging status as a node of North American fandom of the music genre that originated in South Korea and draws on Western music styles from pop to jazz to folk.