Yesterday, while everyone was tweeting about the Grammys, Drake leaked the video for new single Started From The Bottom, which makes the incorrect claim that the wealthy-child-actor-cum-wealthy-hip-hop-megastar somehow started from something other than top.
Despite the implicit claim that even though you’re a well-to-do kid with music industry connections growing up in Forest Hill, who suffered the sobering indignity of having to live in a basement, you’re “from the bottom” because you live in Toronto and not, say, a private Caribbean island or a luxuriant zeppelin that operates as its own independent principality or wherever Drake lives now, the video is pretty Toronto-centric.
Started From The Bottom gives a pretty strong sense of Drake’s impression of Toronto’s bottom-starting dregs, especially in comparison to the domain of superstardom he currently occupies, articulated in the song’s repetitive hook “Started from the bottom, now we here.” (The song is basically just Drake rapping, “Started from the bottom, now we here” for five-plus minutes.)
Per Drizzy’s privileged logic, “start[ing] from the bottom” refers to stuff like…
Playing indoor soccer in an enormous inflatable bubble: In real-life, Drake was a minor hockey player. But maybe soccer is seen as being more legit because you don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on equipment to play it. But any salt-of-the-earth connotations are chucked when you show kids playing inside huge City of Toronto sports dome, shielding them from the outside world. Like, it’s an actual, literal bubble.
Working as the night manager at a Shopper’s Drug Mart: This may not really be Shopper’s Drug Mart, but the waffle-cut grey polo shirts seem to give it away. Maybe Drake thinks that only super-poor people have to do stuff as debased as get jobs? This also seems a confusing, opportunistic collapsing of Degrassi mythology. Wasn’t Shoppers where Joey Jeremiah worked in School’s Out? Did Jimmy Brooks even work there? Sloppy.
Flying low above Toronto in your own personal aircraft: On his way out of this shithole, Drake takes one last pass around Hogtown, a city already dotted with “Started From The Bottom” billboards. Nothing suggests your humble origins like taking out advertising promoting your humble origins. Also only poor people fly their own airplanes. Really rich people have in-house aviators to get their hands dirty with grunt work like this.
Maybe even more absurd than Drake’s estimation of his own homegrown authenticity is his cliched depiction of what being a famous person is. For Drake, being wealthy (or “here”) amounts to…
Standing upright in a snow-white Bentley while driving through the snow: Another weird nod to Drake being a Canadian, i.e. he can weather the cold because of his good Canadian stock. Though it’s pretty easy to stay warm in the winter if you have your own Bentley (likely heated).
Having so much money that you can get your clothes wet just for fun: Presumably when you’re really rich and your clothes get wet, you can just buy new clothes.
Basically being Vinny Chase from Entourage: Now that he’s here, in the present, being rich, Drake is finally free to do stuff like hang out with his buddies, smoking weed and drinking Grey Goose, soliciting music videos starring himself and the bouncing, disembodied behinds of some women. Excepting a scene in a bowling alley, there’s nothing at all interesting about Drake’s conception of his own status and celebrity. But weirdly, the video’s depiction of fame and the resultant wealth seems to backwardly certify Drake not knowing anything about money. It’s like when you’re a kid and you imagine winning the lottery and have no frame of reference for how money works or what the economy is so all you can think of doing is playing the oversized novelty cheque like an electric guitar or converting your windfall into doubloons and diving into a swimming pool full of them like Scrooge McDuck. YOLO, etc.
