Haley Joel Osment weighs in on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Joel Osteen’ reference in Drake diss track, ‘Euphoria’

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Haley Joel Osment rose to fame after seeing dead things, so maybe he saw Drake‘s chances of beating Kendrick Lamar in their rap feud after Lamar dropped “Euphoria.”

The first of Lamar’s four withering diss tracks, “Euphoria” featured a reference to Osment’s roles in The Sixth Sense and A.I. Artificial Intelligencethough Lamar referred to him as Joel Osteen, the 61-year-old televangelist.

But Osment thinks the mix-up was intentional.

Kendrick Lamar, Haley Joel Osment, Drake
Kendrick Lamar, Haley Joel Osment, Drake.ARTURO HOLMES/MG23/GETTY; AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN/FILMMAGIC; KARWAI TANG/WIREIMAGE

“I mean, I don’t know for sure, and I’m not gonna assume that he knows my exact name,” Osment told the AP. “But the way I’ve heard people talk about that and certain analysis that I’ve read about it, I think that it’s an intentional scrambling of my name and that other guy’s name.”

“Kendrick’s too precise to just make a mistake like that, I think,” he added.

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Lamar released “Euphoria” at the end of April in response to Drake’s “Taylor Made Freestyle,” in which the Canadian emcee uses AI to impersonate Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. Drake was forced to remove the song from social media and streaming following threat of legal action from Shakur’s estate.

In “Euphoria,” Lamar raps, “Am I battlin’ ghost or AI? / N—- feelin’ like Joel Osteen / Funny, he was in a film called A.I. / And my sixth sense tellin’ me to off him.”

But according to rap’s online Rosetta Stone, Genius.com, confusing Osteen and Osment could be a “play on the idea that he does not know who he is battling.” The site notes that Osteen has been impersonated by AI and that he has also been accused of using a ghostwriter. And, of course, Osment famously said “I see dead people” in The Sixth Sense, so, “like Osment’s character, Kendrick is battling ghosts.”

Now that’s the kind of wordplay that wins ya Pulitzers. Or maybe K. Dot just made a mistake and he refused to acknowledge it. Either way, well played.

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