New York rappers Jean Grae [ tickets ] and Talib Kweli [ tickets ]'s tag-team performance Wednesday night (3/15) at La Zona Rosa will be remembered as one of the standout shows at this year's SXSW music festival.

Sandwiched amidst a lineup of alt-rock acts, Grae and Kweli grabbed a hold of the crowd--which continued to swell throughout their back-to-back performances--and got them whooping, bouncing and dancing with a barrage of beats and impressive flows that shook the hall and kept viewers captivated.

Grae and her backing DJ were up first, and, despite a relatively choppy set that was filled mostly with song snippets that ended abruptly ("I'm playing a lot of snippets 'cuz I've got so much s--- that I want to get to," she told the crowd), she set the tone for her and Kweli's performances by demanding audience participation ("If y'all up front here ain't gonna get live, then move the f--- back and let some people in the back who want to get live move up front!"). The ploy would have backfired on some performers, but Grae's commanding presence and charisma sold it.

After priming the room for about a half hour, Grae passed the mic to Kweli, who was amped up from the moment he hit the stage. He and his DJ threw gasoline on the already-fired-up crowd with a mix of thunderous beats, surgically accurate scratching and a batch of often unbelievably fast-and-intricate rhymes.

The sizable crowd that Grae had attracted grew even larger when Kweli hit the stage, and almost all audience members obeyed every command that the rapper threw at them: they raised their hands in the air, they waved them from side to side, they bounced up and down, and they shouted Kweli's lyrics back at him when prompted to do so.

By the time Kweli left the stage, it was clear that all in attendance got what they came for.