In case you missed it: Just-left-of-mainstream rapper Danny Brown received oral sex onstage at his show on Friday at Minneapolis's West Bank. This has scandalized social media for most of the week. An early account of the incident on Reddit, titled "I just saw Danny brown get his dick sucked on stage mpls" went like this:
...I was near the front row and all night Danny had been going up to the crowd and having random girls touch his dick through his pants. Then this girl in front of me starts flashing him and he goes up to her and grabs her tits. Then all of a sudden gets up close pulls his shirt up a little and she start blowing him. Then I'm behind her and I start getting pushed against her by the crowd shifting. It horrible and i hope you guys will be donating to my future therapy sessions but also i came back with a story. He rapped the entire time during too Also this [NSFW-ish] photo is floating around.
Now World Star Hip-Hop has posted shaky footage confirming what Danny Brown had already confirmed the night of the incident when, responding to fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar's tweet that read, "u really just got the head on stage stanny?," Brown boasted, "<<<~ and didn't miss one bar bruh bruh." Here it is. It's also NSFW-ish:
This instance of a regularly lewd rapper living his music onstage seems rather cut and dried. Though Brown's sizable profile makes his public sex at least notable, this kind of thing happens at public establishments that aren't necessarily advertised as sex parties all the time. Go to enough gay places in New York, for example, and you'll get desensitized. This hummer is ho hum.
What is worth considering, if briefly, is the account Brown's fangirl tourmate Kitty Pryde wrote of the incident for Vice's Noisey blog. After territorially pissing over female Danny Brown fans, the consciously precious quasi-rapper writes that she was "pretty drunk" when all this went down, but she refutes the Reddit account, explaining, "whoever wrote on Reddit that Danny was 'walking around the stage getting girls to grab his dick' is 100% false, and to blame someone for their own molestation is a shitty thing to do."
Molestation, yes. That is her story. She goes on:
Anybody who is exaggerating this tale to climax is also a lying fool, and to call it a blow job is even going a bit far because it was probably the fastest thing I’ve ever seen. "The Thing" was not a thing that Danny facilitated—it was an actual sexual assault, and somehow nobody gives a fuck about that but me.
It's obvious that the reason nobody cares is because a girl did it to a boy.
Here is the bravado-swinging male rapper's dilemma when faced with unwanted head, according to Kitty Pryde:
Now I’m prepared to kick a motherfucker in the teeth if he touches me at all, and I equip myself with giant boots for that reason. What is Danny supposed to do? The girl was at mouth-to-dick level already and to push her away, he would've had to either pushed her face or kicked her, and even the most gentle of either motion would immediately be labeled “abuse” by anyone watching. Guys pushing girls is not a good look when people are taking photos. So what was Danny supposed to do, other than back away, which he did? And if he had figured out a way to gently push the girl off him immediately without looking like he was smacking her in the face, he’s faced with attacks on his masculinity by every douchebro in the building. Yo dude, you don’t want your dick sucked, bro? Are you gay? Haha you’re gay you don’t want girls to suck your dick haha gay dude bro man swag! And that’s a rapper’s literal nightmare.
It is an interesting dilemma given Brown's image, which isn't outrageously macho but is hetero-sex obsessed nonetheless. If Kitty Pryde is correct (and who knows how well she's familiar with Brown's psychology, especially in this particular case since she says she and her tourmates aren't speaking of what they've termed "The Thing," even though naming it does imply that they have, in fact, spoken about it), a public, unwanted sexual advance from a woman does make for a complicated situation. Masculinity, see, is just so damn delicate.
However, instead of pushing or kicking, which Kitty Pryde posits were Brown's only options, he could have merely stepped back if he weren't into it. He could have turned away and not used this woman as a confirmation of his masculinity, because if Kitty Pryde is correct, this blowjob became transactional in nature. If he wasn't doing it for pleasure, he was doing it for his image, thus consenting for perhaps an unconventional reason but consenting all the same. He also could have shut up about it after instead of bragging later on Twitter that he didn't miss a bar.
The Reddit user who posted the original account followed up by saying that he saw the woman who gave Brown head go into the back with him at the end of the show. Brown has retweeted Kitty Pryde's Noisey post several times. He also has retweeted several women professing their love for him.