Haley Joel Osment has commented on the confusing shoutout that Kendrick Lamar gave him on a recent track.
The namecheck from K.Dot came as part of ‘Euphoria’, his hit diss track towards Drake which arrived shortly before he dropped the explosive hit ‘Not Like Us’.
While the rapper is normally one to break out his quick-witted remarks with razor precision, one lyric in the track left fans confused. This came as Lamar seemed to mix up former child actor Haley Joel Osment – best known for his roles in The Sixth Sense, A.I and Forrest Gump – with the American pastor and televangelist Joel Osteen.
“Am I battlin’ ghost or AI?” Kendrick quipped 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 confusion around the lyric in a new interview. Held as he appeared at the premiere of his new movie Blink Twice, the actor spoke to the Associated Press about what he thinks of the line.
When asked if he got caught up in the whirlwind of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef because of the line, he responded: “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 he was asked by the outlet if he thinks the rapper got him confused with Osteen, Osment said that he thinks K.Dot is “too precise” to make an error as simple as that, but couldn’t say for sure.
“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.”
The two rappers engaged in the beef for a number of months, each sharing a series of songs with increasingly personal verbal attacks over their musical ability and personal lives. The feud came to a head in May – with the two of them releasing five songs over the course of one weekend.
Drake has remained active since it wrapped up, and his collaborator Gordo recently commented on the situation and said the rapper remained undeterred by it all.
“He’s been past it… Ever since all this has happened… I’ve seen him happier. It’s really weird. He’s pretty jolly… The internet makes it seem like, ‘Oh, that photo, he’s all sad and shit.’ That’s just a bad photo from a bad camera,” he said. But because it’s him, it’s put under a magnifying glass like, “Oh, look at his eyes. He’s looking a little droopy. He hasn’t slept.” But the guy’s been happy as shit, to be honest. He’s chilling.”
Since it kicked off, it has been revealed that Lamar’s track ‘Not Like Us’ is eligible for a Grammy nomination, topped the US singles chart and became his fourth Number One song.
It broke various records too, with Brooklyn Eagle reporting that the track has become the hip-hop song that has been streamed the most times in a day on Spotify – racking up 6.8million plays.
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