Started From the Bottom

"Started From the Bottom" is the song that gave the Nothing Was the Same era its rallying cry and gave the wider internet one of the most-repurposed pop quotations of the 2010s. It was the album's lead single, premiered February 1, 2013 via Drake's October's Very Own blog and released to iTunes shortly after. It is produced by Mike Zombie (real name Michael Coleman) with additional production by Noah "40" Shebib, and contains a sample of Bruno Sanfilippo's ambient piece "Ambessence Piano & Drones 1." Drake has said the phrase originated in a studio session with Future, who kept asking engineers to "start it from the bottom" — meaning replay the instrumental from the top — which Drake initially mistook for a song title. He framed the record as a corrective: he commented at the time that people "don't have enough information about my beginnings" and make up a life story for him that isn't accurate, insisting he did not buy his way into his position. The song is widely read as a stylized, knowing origin narrative — the 'bottom' under discussion is middle-class Toronto rather than poverty — and critics including Complex (who named it the second-best song of 2013) praised its stripped-down piano-and-drums minimalism. The Director X-directed video, shot largely in Toronto including a Shoppers Drug Mart sequence, became one of the most-quoted visual moments in Drake's catalog.