  Ke$ha (PHOTO: Mark O'Neill, QMI Agency)
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Hot pop tamale Ke$ha is one ballsy chick, and is proud of it.
Take the time she snuck into Prince’s Beverly Hills house to give him a CD of her music. She bribed a gardener $5 to help her slide under the fence.
“I just think that in life, you have to have balls — and I mean that not in a gross way,” Ke$ha, 22, said in Toronto on Monday night, as she rode into town boasting both the No. 1 pop-rap single, Tik Tok, and the No. 1 debut album, Animal, in North America.
“You have to be ballsy. I mean, granted I could have gotten arrested, but I really wanted him to hear my music. I just think it shows I’m determined, and to lock your doors. He was in the middle of band practice so, like, he didn’t really stop and say anything. But he definitely gave me a look like, ‘What are you doing in my house?’ I realized people kind of started talking and I was like, ‘I gotta go. I’ll see you later.’ ’Cause I kind of creeped myself out there for a minute.”
Needless to say, Ke$ha never heard from Prince, whom she still considers “a god.”
Outrageous behavior aside, the woman born Kesha Rose Sebert in Los Angeles and raised in Nashville comes across in person more like a hippie chick, with an edge.
She’s already got a spot on the 2010 Lilith Fair tour, and claims chart domination isn’t her focus.
“I try not to pay too much attention, because I feel if you get wrapped up in the numbers of it you’re missing the point,” said Ke$ha, seated in a couch at MuchMusic after an on-air performance and interview. “I know (Animal) debuted at No. 1 the first week out, so that’s exciting.”
Much more enthusiatic about her high chart debut, no doubt, is her mother, Pebe Sebert, a singer-songwriter herself who raised Ke$ha as a single mom. Pebe still lives in Nashville, and she co-wrote three songs on Animal — the title track, Your Love Is My Drug and Stephen.
“She’s super-psyched,” said Ke$ha.
Ke$ha got her first break when uber-producers/songwriters Dr. Luke and Max Martin (who have worked with Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Katy Petty, Avril Lavigne and Pink) showed interest in her demos. Then Dr. Luke chose her to sing backup on Flo Rida’s huge hit Right Round, though she never benefited financially from the song’s huge success. That prompted her to put the dollar sign in her first name.
“He’s super-sweet,” she said of Flo Rida. “It’s not like I blame him. And to me, it’s not about the money. That’s the whole reason I have (the dollar sign), ’cause it’s ironic. Like, I don’t care. I was so happy being broke. And I’m happy not being broke. It doesn’t really affect me either way. I care about taking care of people that have taken care of me — that’s important to me. But to be honest, I’m kind of repulsed by the gluttony and excesses of a lot of people in the limelight.”
As for how she addresses men in some of her songs — Blah Blah Blah contains the verse, “Don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat, just show me where your d---’s at,” — Ke$ha says there’s a double standard at work.
“I have very empowering lyrics for women. I kind of take how guys talk to women all over this industry and throw it back at them. And they’re all getting their panties in a wad, and I think that’s hilarious. I’m literally just talking to a man the way any rapper talks about women in every rap song on the radio.”
