While word spread the day before the show that Drake’s three-year-old son Adonis would be in the audience to see his dad accept the Artist of the Decade award at the Billboard Music Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday, few expected the rapper to walk on stage with him.
Drake, clad in a dapper off-white suit with a heart sculpted into his hair, walked on stage holding hands with his son, whose hair was on cornrows, and immediately handed him the award (which was about one-third the tot’s height). The appearance was even more notable because photos of Adonis, let alone public appearances, have been rare.
The award was presented not by Rihanna or Lil Wayne or anyone globally famous, but by Drake’s family and tight-knit team. He walked on stage to accept the award after a video reeling off his many career accomplishments, which include 27 Billboard awards — 12 in 2019 alone.
“That video was really full of a lot of confidence and bravado, but the truth is, I’m really bad at taking compliments,” he said, nodding to a shouting audience member’s unintelligible comment, “Thank you. I’ll take that one right here. I’m really self-conscious about my music, and even if I do a good job, I always wonder how I could have done it better. I rarely celebrate anything. And just for anyone watching this that’s wondering how this happened, that’s really the answer: being so unsure how you’re getting it done that you just kind of keep going in the hopes of figuring out the formula.”
He thanked his fellow top-flight rappers for keeping him on his toes. “I’m feeling so lucky and blessed that the fear of losing it keeps you up at night. I didn’t really write a grandiose speech about how to make it work or what it took, because to be honest, I don’t quite understand it myself. I just know that I’ve spent an incalculable amount of hours trying to analyze all the things I did wrong, but tonight for once I’m sure as hell we did something right.”
He paused, laughing, to stop Adonis from walking offstage before concluding, “To all my peers: All of your decisions and the music you make really does keep me tossing and turning at night trying to figure out what I should do next.”
According to a rep for the show, the people on stage accompanying Drake and Adonis on stage were his father and mother Dennis and Sandi Graham; managers Future and Oliver El-Khatib; and friends/ business associates Nessell Beezer (security), Mark Robinson, Alonzo Thornhill (trainer), Christopher Gibson, Noel Casastre (recording engineer), Matte Babel, Raynford Humphrey, Travis Savoury and Nicholas Carino.
