Rihanna offers up brash performance at GM Place

VANCOUVER - Ke$ha might have dropped a dollar sign into her given name, but Sunday night it was headliner Rihanna who was — as Vince Vaughn's character in Swingers might say — so money.

Still, pop upstart Ke$ha's probably making buckets of it, given the success of Tik Tok, the first single off her debut album, Animal, released earlier this year.

Emerging onstage from the middle of a collection of vertical LED banks and strapped with a guitar modified to resemble a machine gun — which she "played" for a couple of minutes — it seems that Ke$sha is trying to send us a message: she is a naughty, naughty girl.But don't let Ke$ha's Clockwork Orange-inspired eye makeup fool you: there's nothing deviant about her vapid party girl lyrics, though she clearly has a knack for writing infectiously catchy tunes, the kind designed to get lodged in the back of your brain for obnoxious stretches of time.

Take her delightful ditty Dinosaur: "Old man why are you staring at me/Mac on me and my friends, it's kind of creepy/You should be prowling around the old folks' home/Come on dude, leave us alone..."