By JON CARAMANICA

“TiK ToK,” a zippy and salacious celebration of late nights and morningsafter by a new artist named Ke$ha, has spent the last few weeks zooming toward the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Along with “Rapture,” the 1981 hit by Blondie, it’s one of the most successful white-girl rap songs of all time.

Actually, that depends on who you ask.

“TiK ToK” is sung in the chorus and rapped in the verses, enhanced by Auto-Tune in a few places, in keeping with its electro-pop production. There are even a couple of ad-libs by Diddy, and a line that appears to be borrowed from Jermaine Dupri.

“I’ve done the country, done the poprock, done the super-hard electro,” Ke$ha, 22, said . “I was like, whatever, throw some rap in there, why not?” “TiK ToK” is something of a milestone in contemporary pop: the complete and painless assimilation of the white female rapper into pop music.

If she’s rapping at all, that is. “I never thought of her as rapping,” said Barry Weiss, chairman and chief executive of RCA/Jive Label Group, who signed Ke$ha. “I just thought of it as her particular vocal phrasing on certain songs.”

A burgeoning pop star who is primarily a singer, Ke$ha is nevertheless a pioneer. “TiK ToK” and the handful of other rap-influenced songs on her debut album, “Animal” (Kemosabe/ RCA), released January 5, are the product of a world in which hip-hop is the lingua franca, so embedded in pop that it’s possible to make songs that are primarily rapped but are not widely considered to be rap songs.

It’s all part of the continuing deracination of rap, which used to be inscribed as a specifically black act, but which has been appropriated so frequently and with such ease that it’s been, in some cases, re-racinated. The very existence of the casually rapping white girl reflects decreasingly stringent ideas about race and gender.

This has happened before. In the same way that, at the turn of the last decade, rap-metal provided a space for white men to rap without being explicitly compared to their black peers, club-oriented electro-rap has become a haven for white women.

At least for a couple of them. This has been a banner year for white-girl rap. There was the debut album by the Philadelphia rapper Amanda Blank, the relentless, suffocating “I Love You” (Downtown). On “Boom Boom Pow,” the pummeling Black Eyed Peas hit, the surprise was a rapped interlude by the group’s singer, Fergie. Even the country-pop singer Jessie James tried it on “Blue Jeans,” a song that practically owes a publishing check to Dem Franchize Boyz for appropriating the cadence and concept of their 2004 song “White Tee.”

The white female rapper has been one of the last frontiers in hip-hop, but Ke$ha is reframing the conversation. “Her talky, blonde-y, white-girl rap thing, there’s no one else doing that right now,” said the producer and songwriter Lukasz Gottwald, known as Dr. Luke, who signed Ke$ha to his imprint and executive produced “Animal.”

“White rappers who try to sound black,” he continued, are “so uninteresting, so unimaginative.”

Few others have even bothered to try. Debbie Harry of Blondie excepted, the most notable white female rapper has been Tairrie B, who was signed to Ruthless Records, the label headed by Eazy-E of N.W.A. Her 1990 debut album, “Power of a Woman,” made a brief splash, but she gave herself over to heavy metal soon after, and her tough-talking attitude attracted few followers, Ke$ha very much not among them. “I’m not thuggy,” Ke$ha said. “I’m trying to go for the lostmember- of-Whitesnake vibe.”

“I love the Beastie Boys - that’s probably why ‘TiK ToK’ happened,” Ke$ha said. “Rap in general has never been my steez, but I like it.”

Some have compared Ke$ha, unfavorably, to Uffie, who is signed to the influential French electronic music label Ed Banger and whose sass-rap predated Ke$ha’s by a couple of years. “I understand why people need to make that association,” Ke$ha said, “but it’s not like, ‘Yeah, let me just listen to Uffie and rip that off.’ ”

If anyone should feel fleeced by “TiK ToK,” though, it’s Lady Gaga, who probably hears significant chunks of her hit “Just Dance” in its melody and subject matter. But Lady Gaga doesn’t rap, at least not yet, leaving Ke$ha unchallenged as a double threat, even if her singing is still something of a secret.

“I can sing,” Ke$ha said, “and you don’t know that yet.”


CHAD BATKA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, DENIS BALIBOUSE/REUTERS

Ke$ha’s single, “TiK ToK,” an electro-pop rap song, is making its way up the Billboard singles charts. Fergie, left, rapped on a Black Eyed Peas hit.