Fergie Dances With Herself

Slowly, she grew to become a friend of the Peas. "We'd be in the studio till the wee hours," she says, "and we'd go to clubs and go out dancing, and we started becoming this family." The timing couldn't have been better. Elephunk -- spurred by the single "Where Is the Love?" -- sold more than 8 million copies, and the Peas circled the globe several times over before cutting the even bigger Monkey Business. They're one of the most popular hip-hop groups in the world -- this summer they played for 150,000 in Moscow's Red Square -- but in America their blend of hipness and corniness makes them loved by many and an annoyance to many others. Everyone in the group has had twists and hardships in their lives (Apl.de.ap grew up poor in the Philippines and came to America knowing no English; Will struggled to get his family out of the projects while still a teenager; Taboo had his first child at age seventeen), but their music isn't about struggle or edge. Instead, it embraces pop. Will knows that because of this, people question his blackness. When he met the Game, who grew up gang-banging in Compton, Game thought Will was from London.

Fergie refuses to pay much mind to those who dis her. "There's a song on the album called 'Pedestal,' " she says, "which is my answer back to people who don't do anything with their lives but stay on the Internet for hours and talk shit about me. You just sit there and rip me apart, but I bet you didn't know that I went to hell and back. Bet you didn't know that. So this is a question to them: What are you doing with your life?"

Fergie and will finally got down to making her solo album in 2005. Most of The Dutchess was recorded on the road, in a tour-bus studio -- Will loves leaving the stage and going right to work on songs while the energy of the crowd is still with him. Earlier this year the group took two months off from touring, a rarity for the Peas, and rented a house studio in Malibu. "It's got horses there," Fergie says. "It's very different than tour life. It's serene and peaceful, and I could be alone and get into those intimate feelings I wanted to express on the record." She'd held on to "Losing My Ground," reworked it and put it on The Dutchess.

When the solo album was nearly finished and "London Bridge" reached the top of the charts, the weight of all that has happened -- the childhood dream almost lost forever and then recaptured, the band that fell apart and the band that helped her succeed, all the work and tears of a child star-cum-adult-failure-cum-adult star -- it all came upon Fergie at once. "I was in California at Josh's house," she says, "and I looked at my Sidekick and it says, 'You're #1 on Billboard Hot 100.' "Her eyes become shrink-wrapped with tears remembering the moment. "Going Number One on Billboard has been a dream for so long. I started crying, bawling really. It was a happy cry but . . . I felt like I was seven again. I started going over my life, all the ups and downs, everything that I've worked for. And finally this." She wipes away a tear. "It's risiculous."