One of the funniest parts of "Euphoria," Kendrick Lamar's preeminent Drake diss track before "Not Like Us" came along, is the part where he seems to mix up former child actor Haley Joel Osment (of The Sixth Sense/A.I. fame) with the megachurch huckster Joel Osteen (a real-life Righteous Gemstones character). "Am I battlin' ghost or AI?" Kendrick rapped in the song's second verse. "N**** feelin' like Joel Osteen/ Funny, he was in a film called A.I./ And my sixth sense tellin' me to off him."
Now Osment has weighed in on the lyric. Speaking to the Associated Press at the premiere of his new movie Blink Twice, the now fully grown Osment acknowledged that he did indeed catch wind of the reference: "Just a little bit! It's in my text inbox, that's for sure. I was shooting in Ireland when all that happened, and I got like a hundred texts in the middle of the night, and I was like, 'What is going on?'"
When asked whether he thinks Kendrick got him mixed up with Osteen, Osment replied, "I think he's too precise — I mean, I don't know for sure, and I'm not going to 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, because Kendrick's too precise to just make a mistake like that, I think."
Watch him deliver this commentary below.
No comment from Osment on the "I see dead people" bit in "Not Like Us."
