The pop duo Karmin became famous by assaulting other peoples songs, performing glib and highly stylized YouTube covers that inadvertently doubled as sketch comedy. Those that attracted the most attention were the hip-hop songs: seeing the duo’s cheery white singer, Amy Heidemann, gnash her way through complex rhymes and keep up was a spectacle, no doubt, if an awkward one.


Notionally, Karmin is a duo, but Nick Noonan mostly serves as a piano-playing buffer. It’s Ms. Heidemann’s show, a one-woman cabaret of good and bad taste, high and low skill, and absolutely no filter. She’s a Broadway character and looks as if she were prepared for an impending sock-hop outbreak. (Some of the group’s YouTube videos are hair tutorials.)


In an era in which Kreayshawn is signed to a major label, Ms. Heidemann is a credible enough rapper, at least when copying other people’s songs. But on Karmin’s major-label debut EP, “Hello” (Epic), she’s rapping for herself.


But whatever truth value Ms. Heidemann is hoping for in her original material is undermined by the clumsiness of her presentation when covering other songs. Karmin is still best known as an act whose fundamental purpose was to attract attention to itself by denaturing familiar songs and in a sense rendering them comedic.


This sort of highly filtered meta-pop isn’t original to Karmin. Think of K-pop, think of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl,” think of the Eurovision Song Contest. In essence, Karmin is foreign, abusing and replicating styles without understanding the meanings beneath. Her flow is intricate and deeply irritating — this EP features what are almost certainly the only mentions of “ice tall latte” and “sea anemones” to appear in rhyme.


Even the most unethical of acts deserves ethical criticism, though. Is it possible to hear Karmin’s music without hearing Karmin? It would mean filtering out the listening that takes place in the ear from the listening that takes place in the brain.


The goal of “Hello” is to take an act known for repurposing other people’s material and give it an identity of its own. And yet the shadows across this album are long and wide: There’s “I Told You So,” a clear revision of Chris Brown’s “Look at Me Now,” one of Karmin’s signature covers; “Too Many Fish” sounds like a cruise ship band covering Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”; and “Brokenhearted” falls somewhere between Kesha and Katy Perry. Karmin’s style, it turns out, is reference; if it were to have come out with a wholly original sound, it would have been alienating.


Karmin also reflects that hip-hop, once something that had to be protected and, by outsiders, applied to for admission, is fair game for anyone. The barriers to entry aren’t there anymore. The line between theatrically revising other people’s raps and using the medium seriously, for your own purposes, has been all but eradicated for some.


Is Karmin making fun of the records it covers or emulates? Of course not, not intentionally, anyhow. But by delivering them in exaggerated styles more notable for their affectations than for their execution, it in effect renders its source material as a punch line, something not deserving of respect. It’s the bad kind of irreverence.


On its own, Karmin could be treated as an aberration. But its case isn’t helped by its arrival in the middle of a fascinating and quickly evolving moment for white female rappers.


Karmin may be demonstrating the viability of the Kesha model of sing-rap double duty, but nowhere near as well as, say, Cher Lloyd, from England, or My Name Is Kay, from Canada.


But even though that’s the most prominent mode going, it’s by no means the most intriguing. A more fascinating way forward comes in the form of Kitty Pryde, who created a minor Internet starburst this week with the release of a video for her song “Okay Cupid.”


Raised on a diet of Lil B and Odd Future, Kitty Pryde is a part-time college student and full-time shopgirl. A few months ago she released an EP, “The Lizzie McGuire Experience,” full of naïve and unflustered rhymes about people she loves and people she hates. After that came “Justin Bieber,” about the teenage dreamboat, and then “Okay Cupid,” which is arrestingly strange, and arrestingly good.


Kitty Pryde raps as if she were talking, patiently and clearly, in a mildly whiny voice of the sort children use to get parents to pay attention to them. The song, produced by Beautiful Lou, churns hypnotically as she rhymes unlikely syllables and lets her lines unfurl past the expected rhyme breaks.


The video, which was released this week, captures the epitome of teenage lethargy, pining for a useless boy while your friends clutch tallboys and hear out your silly fantasies: “Call me sober when you’re ready/Not going steady/But babe, I’ve planned our wedding already.”


In recent interviews Kitty Pryde seems to be taking a lighthearted and casual approach to making music. She isn’t fighting for any right — those days are gone, mostly. She doesn’t rap because it’s funny or novel, but rather because it’s simply the best and most comfortable tool available to her. The results so far, while almost no one has been watching, have the intimacy and comfort of private recordings.


Knowingness pulses through these songs. What’s more, in the “Okay Cupid” video, she’s wearing a T-shirt featuring the cover of “Ovary Action” (Lookout!), the lone 7-inch EP of the Yeastie Girlz, an all-girl response act to the Beastie Boys that had a brief career in the late 1980s rapping about freedom of speech and sex positivity. It’s an outrageous curio, either a savvy wink or just a cheeky joke. Either way, Kitty Pryde is on to something.