Fergie was deep in show business long before she topped musical charts. Per IMDb, she was just nine years old when she starred alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt, Mario Lopez, and Eric Balfour in the Nickelodeon variety show “Kids Incorporated.” In her role as Stacy, she was one of the more popular characters, and her cover of Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me” has over a million views on YouTube, as of this writing. “Kids Incorporated” was similar to “The Mickey Mouse Club,” the Disney show that launched names like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. Both shows featured song covers peppered with middle school content in a bid to appeal to tweens. “It was a great music and entertainment school for kid actors, but I was embarrassed about it [by the time] I was 14, because it was uncool,” Fergie told The Guardian, sounding like a true 14-year-old herself.
However, she admits that her time on the show influenced her musical genre. “Part of my affinity with urban music comes from being on ‘Kids Incorporated’, [because] we used to sit around [between takes] and listen to Chaka Khan and Prince, and I got influenced by all that,” she told The Guardian. She left the show in 1989, coined the stage name “Fergie” upon joining the Black Eyed Peas, and never looked back.
