So you've got glitter on your eyes, your stockings ripped all up the side and looking (if you do say so yourself) sick and sexy-fied in preparation for local pop tart Ke$ha's spring tour stop in L.A. on May 6 at the Hollywood Palladium. But you decided to wait and buy tickets after spending all your pocket change on dental-hygiene-related Jack Daniels expenses. Tough luck, because she just sold out the entirety of her first headlining venture this spring in support of her mini-album, "Cannibal."  

Fortunately for your wounded, sparkle-spattered pride, her new single "Blow" makes radio rounds next week. But on a side note, am I the only one who thinks she would just be an awesome late addition to this year's Coachella? She could finally back up all that hipster boy-heart baiting in person.

-- August Brown 

With the Jack Daniels barely yet rinsed from her toothbrush, Ke$ha is following her fellow purveyor of ravey synthpop in releasing a quick-followup EP to her January debut album, "Animal."

"Cannibal," available as a standalone record and as part of a deluxe reissue of "Animal" on Nov. 22, clocks in at eight new songs with production work by longtime mentor Dr. Luke, Benny Blanco, Max Martin and, intriguingly, "A Milli" producer Bangladesh. "Cannibal's" first single, the typographically challenging "We R Who We R," will make the rounds to radio Thursday, just in time for any weekend plans to get raked and wake up on an elephant in the desert.

-- August Brown

Photo: Brendan McDermid / Reuters

Her dark and thrilling new show takes on difficult topics, even in her lighter songs.

For the couture-clad Amazons in today's pop ingénue brigade, self-presentation is a battle game of flirtation and threat. Never before has a group of young women so openly explored the darker side of the freedom that women's liberation has brought. Most observers credit Lady Gaga for bringing difficult themes such as self-alienation and violence against women to light, but Rihanna, who brought her first headlining tour to Staples Center Wednesday night, is right there with her on the front lines.

“Last Girl on Earth,” the title of her show, lays out the thematic territory Rihanna travels in her music. Though she started as a carefully controlled teen pop star, by her second album, “A Girl Like Me,” she'd begun exploring the more chaotic side of emotion. Her 2006 ballad “Unfaithful,” which she presented Tuesday as a torchy number sung in a nightclub that might be in Hell, imagines infidelity as a form of murder. She would continue to elaborate on these imaginings of love as a dangerous endeavor in songs such as “Shut Up and Drive” and “Hate That I Love You”; even her biggest hit, the tender “Umbrella,” unfolds in sad rhythms, its lyrics expressing pain as well as faithfulness.

So Rihanna and her collaborators had set the stage for this tour's bombardment of violent imagery — floating machine guns, a hot pink tank, a trashed car, menacing bird demons on stilts — long before her then-boyfriend Chris Brown assaulted her after a party in February 2009, forcing an all-too-real biographical detail on the already dark psychic realm she was exploring in her music. She responded artistically with “Rated R,” a brave album that laid out the sticky web of emotion an abused woman feels. “Last Girl on Earth” expands on this subject by presenting itself as Rihanna's dream world, which turns out to be a very troubling place.

Troubling, but undeniably exciting. Working with the English fine artist Simon Henwood, who directed Kanye West's similarly disconcerting video for “Love Lockdown” (and whose partner is the singer Róisín Murphy, often cited as a source of both Gaga and Rihanna's outrageous fashions), Rihanna has devised an entertainment far more in touch with the unpredictable nature of the subconscious than, say, certain Hollywood movies treading similar ground.

Framed by films that use somewhat clunky language (“This is a dream,” the supertitles blandly announce) and creepy imagery that does seem related to Gaga's Monster Ball screen images, the show placed Rihanna within gothic fantasy landscapes where she delivered her songs in a gutsy, lonely wail.

Ke$ha seems hellbent on pop domination. Now, she's trying to make her mark on Hollywood -- sort of.

In a new viral video the 22-year-old posted on her YouTube page Thursday, she is seen with a posse of girlfriends drunkenly making their way up to the Hollywood sign after a night of partying. She even sent out a incoherent tweet after the deed: “HwOOD $IgN I$ oFFiciaLLY My bIZnatCH!!!!! Good work2allmyHoTCULpritss!! LOOK AT THE SIGN LA!”

Armed with glitter gold spray paint, white tarps and ridiculous disguises, including animal masks, viking hats and her trademark grunge-and-feathered look, the pop phenom ignores a cop (or at least a very talented D-list actor) and hops the fence to vandalize the sign. It's ultimately transformed to read Ke$hawood, her assertion that she will soon dominate the pop world more than she already has.

But the video is really nothing more than a fun hoax. The sign is monitored 24 hours a day, which would make it pretty difficult for the ladies to get within arm's reach of the landmark -- not to mention the letters are 45 feet tall and sneaking ladders up to the site wouldn't be easy.

According to the website for the Hollywood Sign Trust, "even if you had the stamina to ascend the steep, slippery slope without falling, you could still fall victim to a lurking rattlesnake, be scratched by the rough brush or be menaced by a mountain lion."

She might have just clocked a seventh week at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart Thursday with "TiK ToK," but surviving a mountain lion attack? That would be tricky for any pop starlet.

- Gerrick D. Kennedy

Aided by a hit single and a recession-friendly price, the blunt,  urban-flavored electro pop of Ke$ha's "Animal" debuts  at No. 1 on the U.S. pop charts, ending the six-week reign of Susan Boyle's comfy traditionals.

Ke$ha has sold 152,000 copies of her debut, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released by Billboard, with the majority of that tally coming from the digital sector.

Billboard chart sage Keith Caulfield writes that 76% of Ke$ha's sales have been in the form of digital albums, "the largest digital percentage share" for a No. 1 album on the trade publication's charts. It's rare still for the digital share of an album to top 50%, and "Animal" has sold the most single-week downloads since John Mayer's "Battle Studies" tallied 129,000 in November. However Billboard notes that Mayer's figure accounted for only 45% of the singer's overall sales.

Ke$ha's "Animal" carries with it a price fit for impulse purchases. Though her party single "TiK ToK" has been a smashing success, RCA still faces the challenge of transitioning the pop singer from a singles artist to one with a long-term sales impact.

Fans at least appeared willing to spring for the full set in the first week. With a price of  $6.99 at both iTunes and Amazon, the full-length was an easy digital up-sell, especially with Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" and "Blah Blah Blah" each carrying a single price of $1.29. 

Although we said that the 22-year-old pop trollop Ke$ha was a face to watch in 2010, even we at Pop & Hiss were a bit taken aback at how right we were. She currently has the top two slots on iTunes on lockdown, with her inescapable electro-sass singles "TiK ToK" and "Blah Blah Blah." For chart geeks, she also has the distinction of appearing on the two bestselling first-week singles in Billboard history, if you count her cameo on Flo Rida's "Right Round." Whether or not you agree with Ann Powers' take that she's the Mae West of this current pop moment, Ke$ha is the first breakout voice of 2010, and we felt we owed you a longer conversation with her. She spoke with us about condom cannons, her rag-picking skills and finally getting revenge against that chick who stole her car. 

You made your album "Animal" while living in Echo Park, probably L.A.’s most knives-out neighborhood for music snobbery. Did you ever catch flak from the locals for making such unapologetic party pop?

I think hipsters helped me do it. I saw pretension everywhere and wanted to fight against it. Certain songs on the album are serious, but people really need to take themselves less seriously in pop music. I come out on stage and do cartwheels in laser gloves with a cannon that shoots condoms and confetti.

So many musicians are afraid to laugh at themselves. Why is that?

That’s why my Twitter handle is "Keshasuxx,” if I say it first then you can’t say it about me later. People can hate me for any reason they want, but I’ve already beat them to the punch line. 

Ke$ha comes on like a well-worn worst nightmare, her manicure chewed and her morals thoroughly compromised. The 22-year-old music industry brat -- her mom's a songwriter who raised her family in studios and dives from Los Angeles to Nashville -- has irritated some critics by reinvigorating the Girls Gone Wild sexual recklessness of a few years back, but really her act reaches much farther.

She's a classic screwball blond, brassy like Jean Harlow and saucy like Mae West. Hating Ke$ha for kicking pretty boys to the curb and vomiting in the closet of some rich kid whose party she crashed (allegedly, Paris Hilton) is like saying West was too forward when she told Cary Grant to come up and see her sometime.

What makes Ke$ha interesting, though, isn't the substance of her act. It's the way she and her producers -- primarily her mentor, hitmaker Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald -- refashion the screwball heroine role to suit a new era of aggressive superficiality and libertine self-empowerment.

The main lyrical idea behind "Animal" -- that a woman behaving like a sexist, inconsiderate male oaf turns the tables in a way that shocks but ultimately leads to freedom -- is neither new nor particularly useful. But unlike many of the pop ingénues who've tried on this attitude, Ke$ha offers a thoroughly fleshed-out character to embrace or despise.

Her total commitment to the deliberately stupid script "Animal" provides (one that she and her mother, who co-wrote several songs, helped devise) makes it work.

Part juvenile delinquent, part wisecracking dame, Ke$ha pulls the rug out from under the overly proper. She finds power in the modernizing toys of her time, enticing boys with drunken text messages and juicing her libido with the hottest dance-floor beats. If some of her vices, like Jack Daniel's and guys who look like Mick Jagger, are cutely antiquated, she herself is as thoroughly of this moment as is her doppelgänger, Taylor Swift.

Dance artist Ke$ha benefited from post-holiday online shoppers, setting a new record on the Billboard charts for the most ever digital single sales for a female artist. Her "TiK ToK" sold 610,000 digital tracks, according to Nielsen SoundScan data released by Billboard, besting Lady Gaga's "Just Dance," a cut that set the record exactly one year ago when it sold 419,000 copies, reports Billboard. 

Ke$ha, one of The Times' 2010 "faces to watch," will release her RCA debut, "Animal," on Jan. 5. The 610,000 copies sold of "TiK ToK" fall shy of setting a new overall record for single-week download sales, but Ke$ha had a hand in the title holder as well.

Rapper Flo Rida sold 636,000 copies of his "Right Round" last February, Billboard reminds us, a song that feature's Ke$ha's non-credited vocals. Ke$ha spoke to the New York Times about declining to appear in the Flo Rida video for "Right Round," and Jon Caramanica's story notes that Ke$ha received "no payment for her work" on the track.

“You have to be patient, you have to do things right,” Ke$ha explained to the New York Times. “If you want to be a legitimate artist, it’s more important what you say no to. I knew he would want me to be some sexpot, shake my booty and whatever.”