“I think it’s an intentional mixing of my name with the other guy’s name,” the actor said of the biting Drake diss “Euphoria,” in which he confuses his name with that of televangelist Joel Osteen.
Although it probably nothing compared to the amount of text messages Drake probably received when Kendrick Lamar released “Euphoria.” Haley Joel Osment’s phone also died that day. About five and a half minutes into the nearly seven-minute diss track, Lamar references Osment’s filmography, but refers to him as Joel Osteen, the pastor and televangelist. The actor has only loosely followed the rap drama, but believes there was a reason for the name change.
“I was filming in Ireland when this all happened, and I got about a hundred texts in the middle of the night. I was just like, what’s going on,” Osment told The Associated Press at the premiere of Blink Twice in Los Angeles. “I think he’s being too specific — I mean, I don’t know for sure, and I don’t assume he knows my exact name. But from what I’ve heard people talk about it and certain analyses I’ve read about it, I believe my name and the other guy’s name were deliberately jumbled up.”
In “Euphoria,” Lamar raps, “Am I fighting ghosts or AI/N—feeling like Joel Osteen/Funny, he was in a movie called AI/And my sixth sense tells me to kill him.” The first part of the lyric is a reference to “Taylor Made Freestyle,” the diss track Drake released in April that used AI to create verses from Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. (Tupac’s estate sent him a cease-and-desist letter.)
Some listeners have theorized that the switch from Osteen to Osment could be an indication that Lamar is unaware of his opponent’s form. Others have chalked it up to Osteen simply being the better choice to move on from “him.”
It’s perhaps worth noting that Lamar is the first non-classical or jazz artist to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. As Osment said, “Kendrick is too precise to make a mistake just like that.”
