At Rogers Arena on Friday, September 9

As a party trick that got the Rogers Arena crowd all a-Twitter, it shouldn’t have had anything on the night’s glitter-gun pop shots, testicles-swinging penis, and full-bore Elmo demolition. Still, it would weirdly sum up everything that’s admirably ballsy about Ke$ha, who, undeservedly, takes more shit than anyone topping the charts today.

The L.A.-via-Nashville crunk-pop tart’s greatest moment of an undeniably uneven set came early on, near the tail end of “Party at a Rich Dude’s House”. In keeping with the dominant theme of the night, the song was turned into a low-rent spectacle, with backup singers body-surfing the stage on pimped-out Coleman coolers, and destroying lawn furniture with enough enthusiasm that you could almost hear the dudes from FUBAR screeching “Fuck that chair up!”

So what did Ke$ha do to top all that? Well, that would be a cartwheel. That’s right, a good, old-fashioned, grade 7 gym-class cartwheel. What made it astonishing, though, was the execution. Or, more accurately, lack thereof. Let’s just say that Stephen Hawking could have pulled off said move with more style than the artist known to her former P.E. teachers as Kesha Rose Sebert. But the great thing about it was that her less-than-perfect attempt somehow spoke volumes about where she’s coming from as an artist.

Forget choreographing the shit out of her show to where every bit of honesty seems leeched out of it, Ke$ha turned in a set that somehow came off as real. Or, at least as real as a major stadium production can be. Clearly, she doesn’t give a shit, which is part of her considerable charm.

The singer has come a long way in a short time. A little over a year ago she was pulling support duty for Rihanna at Rogers Arena. This night she was back as a headliner, making a leap that required her to work twice as hard as the Katy Perrys, Gwen Stefanis, and Rihannas of this world. Where those multi-platinum pop stars have the resources to mount full-blown Vegas-quality spectacles, Ke$ha’s still at a point where the high-tech eye candy is out of reach.

So instead of straight-out-of Jurassic Park animatronic reptiles, the percussion-bombed snot-rapper “Dinosaur” had her sharing the stage with a backup dancer in a foam lizard head. Even more refreshingly DIY was “We R Who We R”, which found the singer and her small, glow-in-the-dark support cast stripping down to their Fruit of the Looms, donning feathered hard hats, and making the most of a bank of black lights.

As for the stage banter, there were the usual proclamations about Vancouver being the fucking craziest city on the planet, with the most insane motherfucking partiers in the galaxy. But there were also moments where Ke$ha made that all-important connection with the audience by veering from the script, highlights including her claiming to have spent the day skinny-dipping at one of the local beaches. Evidently, the granny-inspired Australian bathing suit didn’t make the trip.

If things were refreshingly sloppy from a visual perspective, there was no arguing that the show was completely professional on the musical end. Sorry haters, but Ke$ha can actually sing, proving this without question on both the ballads (“Animal”) and the club bangers (“Take It Off”). Her main problem though is that she’s still a handful of hits short of being able to deliver a solid headlining set. Sure, “TiK ToK” had the Rogers Arena crowd going apeshit, but nothing—including Ke$ha’s AK-47 guitar, faded American Flag T-shirt, and Vince Neil rooster ’do—was going to hide the fact that “Blah Blah Blah” was more filler than killer.

Well, almost nothing. In hindsight, Ke$ha could have done a cartwheel.

Follow Mike Usinger on Twitter at twitter.com/mikeusinger.