Danny Brown and Kitty at Irving Plaza About halfway through Kitty's opening set at Irving Plaza on Tuesday night, a pair of young women walked into the room, looked onstage and squealed, turning to each other and talking animatedly about how happy they were to see her. A couple of minutes before, in the center of the room, a clutch of other attendees were expressing their feelings in far more severe terms. After Kitty mentioned the show's headliner, the Detroit rapper Danny Brown, and the group they are both part of, Bruiser Brigade, a group of young men yelled unpublishable obscenities at her for about 30 seconds. Not only were they tasteless and offensive, but they were also specific, referring to a concert last month in Minneapolis where Mr. Brown may have received oral sex onstage from an audience member. Kitty didn't notice the comments, or pretended not to. This sort of misogyny is rote, and likely to be familiar to this rapper, who wrote an intense, sharp defense of Mr. Brown, identifying the episode - captured in blurry photo and shaky video on the Internet - as a sexual assault, and astutely detailing how expectations about race and gender made it difficult for Mr. Brown to identify as a victim, if indeed he was. Mr. Brown is a self-identified libertine, his music happily sexual, his mood loose and substance-altered. In an interview last year with Noisey, he discussed a concert - a different one - in which he got intimate with an audience member midperformance. There would be none of that at this show, of course, whether because of the long shadow cast by Minneapolis, or the photo pit that ensured at least some distance between Mr. Brown and the crowd. Mr. Brown is a terrific and terrifically weird rapper: hair erupting like a mushroom cloud, voice cartoonishly nasal, tongue forever stuck out. His pair of recent albums, "The Hybrid" and "XXX," have been forceful and eccentric, full of improbably catchy songs brimming with off-kilter bravado and sometimes blistering humor. At this show he was heavy with charisma, a performer easily in control of his material. In places, he messily sipped from a bottle of Champagne he'd come out onstage gripping, grinning madly. He performed a handful of songs from his forthcoming album "Old," which sounded more blatantly dance-music-driven than his earlier work, an adjustment many rappers wouldn't be able to make, but which felt natural for a rapper as nimble as Mr. Brown. The sex-and-drugs subject matter was familiar, though. Of course, it is one thing to write songs about certain topics, a whole other thing to manage how those songs are received out in the real world. It is notable, though, that Mr. Brown chose to tour with Kitty - formerly Kitty Pryde - a pairing that captures many of the contradictions of today's independent hip-hop scene. Kitty is a young white female rapper who delivers savage emotional and social observation with wide-eyed sweetness. In her breakthrough video, "Okay Cupid," she wrote Mr. Brown's name on a binder with a heart next to it. Her stage presence is part reluctance, part eye-roll - she knows what the crowd is going to be like, and she's appropriately disdainful of it. At one point her boyfriend, the producer Hot Sugar, took a water bottle, rubbed it against his crotch under his pants, and threw it at the boors in the crowd, a mild, gross defense. Mr. Brown himself has yet to comment directly on what happened in Minneapolis, apart from a boastful Twitter reply to the rapper Kendrick Lamar - since deleted. And he didn't mention it here, in an environment that at times was hostile to his female fans, and Kitty's too. Maybe handling criticism isn't his forte: on Wednesday morning he threw barbs on Twitter at a female journalist who wrote angrily about the tenor of the crowd. Certainly Mr. Brown has other things to say on the matter. Everyone involved deserves more, and better.