Drake’s baby Adonis is already eight months old, but his existence wasn’t widespread public knowledge until quite recently. What was Drake’s impressive PR secret, you might ask?
Dollar, dollar bills, y’all.
In a freestyle he dropped this weekend on BBC Radio’s Fire in the Booth, Drake laid out the very blunt, yet effective strategy he used to keep his fatherhood under wraps.
“Make sure the staff are paid well, make them think twice about the stories that they tell,” he rapped. “They don’t know when the plan is hatching, I’m going to let them walk on eggshells.”
The power of a check, coupled with keeping his PR strategy close to the vest, means it could have been entirely possible for Drake to keep his son a secret indefinitely. The celebrity gossip industry is run on the exchange of perks, favors, and, most often, cold hard cash — TMZ, for example, is known for getting its juicy scoops and exclusive videos by paying those “anonymous tipsters” hundreds to thousands of dollars for insider content, which translates into clicks. Selling celeb secrets is a lucrative business, but it turns out Drake’s plan was to just pay more: “Tricks up sleeves, got them playing innocent to get the shit I need,” he rapped on BBC Radio. A flex.
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And if it wasn’t for the unforeseen Shakespearean twist that was “The Story of Adidon” (more on that in a second), the plan was working. The first few telling reports on Sophie Brussaux’s pregnancy months ago were promptly dismissed by Drake’s team. Adonis wasn’t actually confirmed by Drake himself until the release of Scorpion at the end of last month — and that was most likely in response to a nasty rap beef that turned very personal, very fast, money be damned.
As we all now know, it took some top-tier investigative reporting on Pusha T’s part, and a deep dive into celebrity gossip columns (who knew Pusha subscribed to TMZ’s breaking news alerts?) to finally blow the lid off the rumors and bring Drake’s reluctant fatherhood to light. Pusha, clearly more interested in destroying Drake’s life than in any check, called Adonis out by name and Drake out as an absentee dad in his now notorious feud with the superstar: “You are hiding a child,” Pusha drawled on “The Story of Adidon.” Once that hit the web, no sum of money could have kept the secret locked up any longer.
And there lies the fatal flaw in Drake’s C.R.E.A.M. agenda: cash rules everything, until it doesn’t.