By the time the South Korean rapper Keith Ape made it to the nightclub S.O.B.’s in April for his first New York show, just three months had passed since the release of “It G Ma,” his breakout single.

In that time, a lot had happened. First, the Internet grabbed hold of the song’s video and spread it wide. Then the controversy started. The clear precursor to “It G Ma” (meaning “never forget me”) was “U Guessed It,” a 2014 song by the young Atlanta rapper OG Maco. The choruses were very similar, and the “It G Ma” video, too, was somewhere between homage and bite, with Keith Ape and his crew running wild through a hotel, much as OG Maco had done in his video.

“I’m aware of the Koreans that mocked me and took my sauce. I’m not impressed. I’m not inspired. I think it’s kinda lame. To each his own,” OG Maco wrote on Twitter. “I didn’t have grills or extra jackets and lean cups,” he added, “so why did they? Black stereotypes. Lame.”

And yet at S.O.B.’s, any sense of cultural misstep or misappropriation appeared to have been trumped. It was an outrageously rowdy show. Dozens of people crowded the stage — Keith Ape and members of his Korean crew, the Cohort; plenty of other rappers; scads of hangers-on. When he got to “It G Ma” at the end of the night, everyone onstage — Asian, black, white and more, an invigorating polyracial tumble — shouted the song’s refrain, bumping up against one another like the stage was a mosh pit.