It truly feels as though years have passed since the whole Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake rap beef descended into diss track madness, but realistically, it's only been a handful of months. Still, the repercussions linger: artists affiliated with Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) are finding their Toronto shows at History, a big dumb rock club co-owned by Drake, falling victim to last-minute cancellations.
Early on in the rappers' exchange of diss tracks came this April's "euphoria," wherein Lamar used Toronto slang against a decidedly no-longer cheesin' 6ix God. Someone else who was name-dropped on that track is Texas televangelist Joel Osteen — except, judging by the larger contextual clues in the lyrics, the rapper actually meant actor Haley Joel Osment, who has now responded to the (purposeful?) mix-up.
In a recent red carpet interview for Blink Twice, Osment revealed to the Associated Press that he had been in Ireland shooting a movie when his phone started blowing up with "like a hundred" texts about Lamar's song. "I was like, 'What is going on?'"
On the track, 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."
While Osteen might be more of a divisive figure than Osment, the actor doesn't think Lamar mixed them up by accident. "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," Osment said. "Because Kendrick's too precise to just make a mistake like that."
Further proof is in the pudding of Lamar subsequently pulling Osment's "I see dead people" line from The Sixth Sense to kick off his undeniable best Drake-dissing offering, "Not Like Us," which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in May — and has since become something of a global anti-Canada anthem.