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Celeb News: Ke$ha Almost Naked + Vibe Magazine Interview
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 9,391
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Ke$ha Almost Naked + Vibe Magazine Interview
 
Quote:
THERE’S MORE TO KE$HA THAN JACK DANIEL’S MOUTHWASH. POP’S PARTY ANIMAL IS ALSO A HUMANITARIAN, COMPARATIVE RELIGION WHIZ AND ONE OF YOUR FAVORITE RAPPER’S FAVORITE RAPPERS. WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND THAT
Story: Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Photography: Sarah McColgan
Ke$ha is losing it.
Cradling a sole, gleaming high-top sneaker in Los Angeles’ most unassuming hole-in-the-wall sneaker shop, the bleach-blonde pop star is almost shrieking, because not only is the sneaker a flashy metallic shade of purple—it’s a reissued ’90s-style LA Gear Lights, which means that when she walks in it, the heel will light up like she is in her own perpetual “Billie Jean” video. Repeatedly hitting the shoe heel with her palm, mesmerized by its flash, she straight freaks: “Holy ****! Oh my God! Can I have them all?”
They are, indeed, incredible, and the disco light situation happens to work with the leggy singer’s outfit—in black trousers, glittery loafers, and smudged sparkly eye shadow, the 25-year-old is giving so much Michael Jackson, looking every bit the part of the pop sensation she is. More importantly, she looks like she’s had a full night’s rest: It’s a put together, subtle flip from the last-night’s-mascara appearance she’s presented in most of her videos, where her public persona is that of the debauched, somewhat trashy night owl on the prowl for booze and a one-night-stand (if he acts right). But in the middle of this shoe shop on Melrose, seemingly oblivious to the stragglers gawking at her, this is pure kid-like excitement, no liquor required. “I’m not frivolous, I never go shopping,” she says. “And I love cheap costume jewelry. An underlying theme [of my first album, Animal] was how you can be broke and still have fun. Money doesn’t determine whether I’m happy. But it’s really fun to get light-up shoes,” she giggles.
Ke$ha is like a kid in a candy shop—and after buying a few pairs in various colorways, she decides that she actually wants candy. When she leaves the sneaker store, though, paparazzi awaits—three photographers have somehow tracked her down (the cashier and Instagramming shoppers seem likely culprits) and now they're wielding their cameras in her face, back-peddling in front of her while her bodyguard, Mr. Black, tries to shield her. She’s friendly, though, and shoots a quick video for TMZ, flossing her shoes and telling the cameraman, “My **** lights up.”
Before the cash, the paps, and the light-up shoes, Ke$ha was just Kesha Rose Sebert from Nashville, Tenn., the daughter of a single mom, Pebe, who made her living as a country music songwriter. They were poor, but happy, and Kesha was a model student, spending her summers studying comparative religion in a gifted teen program at New York’s Columbia University, writing songs and absorbing all the music she could—Beastie Boys, Prince, Bob Dylan, the Flaming Lips. Still, she didn’t really fit in at school in the Bible Belt.
“I came from a single-parent home, my mom had a nose ring and tattoos, and I’d make my own clothes,” she says. “People just thought I was a ****ing freak.” She moved to Los Angeles when she was 17 at the behest of Dr. Luke, the pop machinist who’d heard her demos; she slept on his couch and added the dollar-sign to her name when she was still poor, as both an ironic joke and something to aspire to.
Back then, Ke$ha was writing songs for “anyone,” working in a coffee shop, and crashing studio sessions with Luke. That’s where she cut her lusty vocal for Flo Rida’s 2009 hit “Right Round,” where most people first heard her—but it wasn’t until the party anthem “Tik Tok” dropped later that year that the world got a true taste of the cowboy-booted bad girl. An electro-pop hybrid with a yodeling chorus and gleaming dance floor synth line, the song features the still-quoted line, “Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack, ’cause when I leave for the night I ain’t comin’ back,” which reads something like her mission statement. To top it off, Diddy called in a couple of ad-libs, establishing Ke$ha as party-hard royalty out the gate. She filmed the video at her friend’s flophouse in Echo Park, Calif., looking very hung-over with smeared eye makeup and general hot-mess steez. She’d written the song based on her experiences, and it solidified her public image as a wild child, whose booze- and boy- lust were defining qualities. And most of the raunchy fun, hybrid electronic pop-rap singles from Animal and her subsequent EP, Cannibal, supported as much.
But after two years of touring, a never-ending TMZ stream about her exploits (Ke$ha goes to the beach! Ke$ha wears booty shorts!), and a soul-cleansing “spirit journey” that included swimming with baby whales (more on that later), it’s clear the party-girl image has become tiresome, and Ke$ha’s ready to break free. “The first record was a celebration of partying and being young, but this record’s a better look at my personality. Whatever, I drink like a champion. But I can also do other stuff,” she laughs. “I have a sense of humor about my lyrics. I’m not a train wreck, I’m just having fun.” Dr. Luke, who executive produced her as-yet-untitled upcoming LP, agrees. “When Katy Perry put out ‘I Kissed a Girl,’ people [thought] she was a one-trick pony,” he says. “But when you put out another record that’s great, that answers all those questions. [Ke$ha] doesn’t need to do anything to let people know she’s more than just a party girl. The music will speak for itself.”
On the new album, Ke$ha builds on the style she’s known for—high-energy dance music of the pop variety, folding in her varied influences through an unlikely blend of punk rock (including collaborations with the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne and her idol Iggy Pop); actual yodeling; and coy, sassy white-girl rap, although she’s not entirely comfortable with declaring herself a rapper. “The first time someone called me a rapper, I started laughing,” she says. “I was shocked, and thought it was hilarious. But then, Andre 3000 was telling me how he thinks I’m a good rapper. And Wiz, who’s a good friend of mine, thinks I’m a good rapper? Snoop? It’s crazy and funny to me.” More important to her is that people know she’s a singer: Because of her copious use of Auto-Tune on earlier projects, she was accused of not being able to sing, and she’s toned down the effects. (She’s been absentmindedly singing all day—in the car, in the bathroom, walking down the street—and it sounds great.)
And though the album is as life affirming as ever, there’s a tinge of sadness. Lead single “Die Young” is about living for the moment, making “the most of the night like we’re gonna die young.” On the will.i.am co-written “Crazy Kids”—which yodeling, acoustic guitar, and heavy booty bass, and strangely works—she says, “Haters gonna hate/And this is all we got and then it’s gone/So call us the crazy ones/We gonna keep on dancing till the dawn.”
“I’ve really just been doing a lot of thinking about life,” Ke$ha says, looking somberly at the stacks of shoeboxes at her feet in the sneaker shop. “The first record, people tore me a new asshole, and were ****ing steady on my balls, and tried to make me feel like I was such a piece of ****. I did some soul-searching, and realized nothing I’m doing is negative, it’s actually super positive. You can change peoples’ mood in a three-and-a-half minute song. So why not spread positive energy and be funny? Let [the haters] be miserable. Anyone who wants to have a good time, let’s ****ing do this.”
As if to prove a point: She pulls her leg out from under her to reveal one of her most recent tattoos on her bare foot, the word fun scrawled in her own handwriting. “I had a birthday party downtown with a tattoo artist, free booze, and a photo booth. And it was the funnest party ever. Everyone I love was there. I ended the night jumping on a mini-trampoline. So I got the tattoo artist like, ‘I need you to commemorate this night with the word fun on my feet.’ He was like, ‘Really?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. Do it.’”
For all Ke$ha’s spontaneity, for all her love of the moment, for all her endless enthusiasm for the night, straight up, she’s a little bit of a hippie. She admits it. “Not like the patchouli kind of hippie, but the kind where you love everybody,” she says. It’s her sense of love and empathy that inspired Ke$ha’s “spirit journey,” which she embarked upon in September 2011, just after she was named the Humane Society’s first-ever Global Ambassador for the animals. Influenced by her family—her brother’s in the Peace Corps in Honduras—and wanting to fully understand what that meant, she took a long break from work, didn’t tell anyone where she was going, and traveled to Galápagos Islands, Australia, and South Africa to raise her own awareness of animal rights. “I went swimming with whales in the middle of nowhere, it was like naked boat ladies swimming with baby whales for a week,” she says. “Then I was rehabilitating baby lions who were like pissing in my tent, and I was feeding them with a bottle, because their parents orphaned them and they’re trying to rehabilitate these other lions that were kept in captivity.”
Her face softens when she remembers it, and she kind of glows, not at all like the up-all-night Ke$ha of past red carpets. She gets the same look on her face later, backstage in a dressing room at Staples Center waiting to prerecord a skit for the VMAs when she talks about her fans—who she’s appropriately christened her Animals. “It can’t be said enough: be yourself, love each other. I’ve had to deal with scrutiny [in Nashville] that probably isn’t even comparable to the kind of scrutiny people from a place like that face being gay or lesbian. A lot of my fans struggle with that, and it breaks my heart that people haven’t found out how to be nice to each other.”
Coincidentally, her VMA skit is built off the idea that Ke$ha is the farthest thing from a contemplative, spiritual, all-loving hippie type: The gag is, she’s costumed in a ballerina bun and yoga pants, surrounded by candles, trying to relax for the evening, supposedly hilarious and incongruous to her party style. But if Ke$ha represents anything, it’s exactly that you can be both, or many things, or anything. “If I tried to pretend to be something I wasn’t, people would have smelled ******** a long time ago,” she says. “I would've gotten eaten alive if I tried to be a heel-wearing little princess. It’s just not who I am. I’ve had people try to make me act right, but it’s just not gonna happen. I just can’t not say inappropriate things.”
Later, Ke$ha will be at pole-dancing club and frequent haunt Jumbo’s Clown Room, knocking back tequilas and handing out stacks of dollar bills so a trio of ladies can make it rain on the not-quite-naked dancers. For now, though, she’s concentrating on Mr. Peep$, the tiny cat she adopted from a sketchy Russian dude one night outside of a strip club. The slender Siamese is racing around the pristine black carpet, sniffing in nooks and crevices, attacking anything smaller than a loaf of bread. He’s adorable and spry, with a standard catlike level of cojones, misbehaving and charming everybody around because of it. He also happens to be dressed in full costume: a yellow-orange pullover hoodie with a mane that makes him look like a cartoon lion. Ke$ha coos at his adorable black-and-tan face in a high-pitched, sort of alien-singer chirp and gushes, “He’s really kind of bad, but he’s just so, so sweet.”
Ever hear what they say about pets becoming just like their owners?
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Source:
http://www.vibe.com/article/keshas-2012-vibe-cover
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Member Since: 10/15/2011
Posts: 4,670
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Member Since: 6/28/2012
Posts: 2,182
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HOT!
I just need some color in her lips
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ATRL Senior Member
Member Since: 9/22/2011
Posts: 16,128
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Over photoshopped tbh. She looks hot though.
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Member Since: 12/13/2010
Posts: 5,280
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Sorry but
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 11/5/2011
Posts: 100,491
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Ke$ha on VIBE?  (no shade)
wow, get it! 
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Member Since: 8/21/2011
Posts: 8,665
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1 & 2 Pic  But I don't like the 3rd Pic :/
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Member Since: 9/13/2012
Posts: 5,486
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“Haters gonna hate/And this is all we got and then it’s gone/So call us the crazy ones/We gonna keep on dancing till the dawn.”
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Member Since: 4/29/2012
Posts: 15,977
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The thrid picture though 
The first two look fine though
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Member Since: 5/31/2008
Posts: 11,688
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Member Since: 10/13/2005
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Member Since: 9/3/2010
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I'm getting a Gwenish vibe. She does look good tho.
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Member Since: 9/15/2011
Posts: 3,184
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She looks kinda like Lana 
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Banned
Member Since: 6/15/2011
Posts: 6,134
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She's been looking amazing lately. I hope she keeps this look for a while.
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Member Since: 5/6/2011
Posts: 26,891
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Hottest Ive ever seen her 
Shes really going (for a) clean (look) for the new era
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Member Since: 9/13/2012
Posts: 5,486
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ehy, look like P!nk with long hair 
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Member Since: 5/12/2012
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omg, she looks amazing 
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Member Since: 4/23/2011
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Member Since: 12/3/2011
Posts: 11,947
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I'm gonna read the whole thing, but you should highlight the important parts of the article.
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Member Since: 10/12/2010
Posts: 17,351
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She looks so good 
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