Fergalicious

Two years into her run with the Black Eyed Peas, Fergie stepped out on her own with a single built entirely around her own name. Fergalicious arrived in October 2006 as the second single from her debut solo album The Dutchess, and it wastes no time: the first thing you hear is will.i.am counting off in Spanish, "four, tres, two, uno," before the beat drops. The track was written by Fergie and will.i.am, who produced it and raps on it too, trading verses with her over a clattering, club-ready backdrop.

The production stitches together a few familiar sources. J. J. Fad's 1988 record "Supersonic" and Afro-Rican's "Give It All You Got" supply the rhythmic skeleton, and the bridge borrows from "Night Train," the Jimmy Forrest riff that James Brown later cut with his own band. There is a Kraftwerk thread running through it as well, the kind of electronic pulse that German pop writers have traced back to the Düsseldorf group's influence on hip-hop and dance music. Fergie leans into the chant-like structure critics kept comparing to the Peas' "My Humps," but the persona here is all hers, a playful, self-mythologizing narrator who spells out her own appeal in the chorus.

The song did serious business. It climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and landed in the top five in Australia and New Zealand, moving more than 3.5 million digital downloads in the US on its way to a 4x Platinum RIAA certification. Fatima Robinson directed the video, which drops Fergie and will.i.am into a candy factory with a clear Willy Wonka debt, gumdrops and conveyor belts and all. The lyrics turned out to have a long afterlife of their own, resurfacing in quiz features, retrospectives, and a thousand karaoke nights. [edit]