Though it was likely nothing in comparison to the volume of texts Drake probably received when Kendrick Lamar dropped “Euphoria,” Haley Joel Osment’s phone was blowing up that day, too. Around the five-and-a-half minute mark of the nearly seven-minute-long diss track, Lamar makes a reference to Osment’s filmography but refers to him as Joel Osteen, the pastor and televangelist. The actor has only loosely been following the rap drama, but believes there was a reason behind the name switch.
“I was shooting in Ireland when all that happened and I got like a hundred texts in the middle of the night. I was like, what is going on,” Osment told the Associated Press at the Blink Twice premiere in Los Angeles. “I think he’s too precise — I mean, I don’t know for sure, and I’m not gonna assume that he knows my exact name. 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.”
On “Euphoria,” Lamar raps: “Am I battlin’ ghost or AI/N—a feelin’ like Joel Osteen/Funny, he was in a film called A.I./And my sixth sense tellin’ me to off him.” The first portion of the lyric is a reference to “Taylor Made Freestyle,” the diss track that Drake released in April that utilized A.I. to create verses from Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. (The Tupac’s estate sent him a cease-and-desist letter).
Some listeners have theorized that the Osteen-Osment switch could be a nod to Lamar not knowing what form his opponent is taking. Others have chalked it up to Osteen simply being the better choice to follow up with “off him.”
It’s perhaps worth noting that Lamar is the first non-classical or jazz artist to ever receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music. As Osment said: “Kendrick’s too precise to just make a mistake like that.”
