It’s been quite a year for Kendrick Lamar. “Not Like Us,” one of his many Drake diss tracks, went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and “The Pop Out — Ken & Friends” show was a one-of-a-kind California performance. He’s even working on a movie with South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
Really, the only blemish on Lamar’s 2024 is the time he confused Haley Joel Osment for Joel Osteen. On “Euphoria,” he 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.” One is an acclaimed actor and the voice of Sora in the Kingdom Hearts video games (Osment); the other is a shady televangelist (Osteen). But The Sixth Sense and A.I. Artificial Intelligence actor thinks the mix-up might have been on purpose.
“I think he’s too precise,” Osment told the Associated Press at the premiere of Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice (via Billboard). “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. Because Kendrick’s too precise to just make a mistake like that.”
Or maybe the simplest explanation is the correct one: Kendrick really did confuse the two. Here’s another way to tell them apart so this doesn’t happen again: no one ever found bags of money in Haley Joel Osment’s church.