Current Obsession: Drake’s new Toronto-tastic video for “Started From the Bottom”
Drake was a busy guy last night. While he was attending the Grammy’s—where he picked up the Best Rap Album award for Take Care and pretended he was too cool to dance to the Bob Marley tribute—his label officially released “Started From the Bottom,” the lead single from him upcoming album Nothing Was the Same.
The accompanying video dramatizes the song’s incessantly repeated hook (“Started from the bottom/Now we’re here”), following Drake and his boys from “the bottom” (days spent stocking shelves at Shoppers Drug Mart) to “here” (an unidentified tropical utopia with jet skis, cognac and the requisite faceless bikini babes). The implication that Toronto is somehow at the bottom aside, the video makes me swell with hometown pride, from the scenes of Drizzy cruising Forest Hill in his Bentley to the copious glamour shots of the skyline taken from his G6. There’s also something sweet about seeing the toothpaste aisle of Shoppers turned into a confetti-strewn club for Drake to show off his signature slalom shuffle.
Bronwen Jervis is the editorial assistant at Toronto Life.
