The man they call Will.I.Am has one of the busiest hard drives in hip-hop these days, and he carries it with him in a case marked "Will's Travel Kit".

Recently, the leader of the Black Eyed Peas slid behind the keyboard of a computer in the mobile music studio that follows him on tour, loaded up the drive and clicked through a directory of his dizzying workload.

There were chunks of the new songs he's producing for Nas, Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg, Macy Gray and Diddy, as well as a theme song he's producing for the Wolfgang Petersen film Poseidon and recent remixes he's done for the Rolling Stones, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Busta Rhymes.

More than music

But the hard drive is more than music projects.

Will clicked on a video file: "This is the Adidas campaign I did for the World Cup," he said, bringing up an image of kids playing soccer on a dusty field with their kicks keyed to a pulsing, Latin-flavoured soundtrack.

"And this one is a short film I did with Snickers; they're doing films because TiVo is killing commercials."

The vagaries of the advertising world are important to Will because the Black Eyed Peas are corporate America's leading hip-hop partner and proud of it.

The Peas are now on the Honda Civic Tour, a 35-city tour that will end in Colorado in May, and they have done commercials for Verizon, Apple iTunes and Best Buy.

They rewrote one of their songs to accommodate a major NBA advertising campaign.

They are also characters in a video game (The Urbz: Sims in the City), they have performed at the Super Bowl and Will and the other three members of the group met with executives of the Hard Rock Hotel to go over plans to create a Black Eyed Peas suite.

Ambitious

As Fergie, the group's female singer, examined a swatch of faux chinchilla fur, Will told a surprised Hard Rock official that the planned multimedia experience for the room wasn't ambitious enough.

"Is there any way to hook the room up to my hard drive so I can pick what people see and hear when they stay in the suite? I mean, it's our suite."
 
The group's members - Will, Fergie, Taboo and Apl.de.Ap - grew up in Los Angeles.

Will said growing up in the city's urban grid primed them to view the world through brand names.

"In Beverly Hills do you have billboards on every damn corner? Do you have posters on every wall, selling stuff in the suburbs? Well, you do where I grew up," he says.

"In the urban areas, everything is signs for liquor stores and motels and ads for sneakers and cars and Schlitz malt liquor. They're selling you stuff your whole life. So hip-hop made it part of its culture."
 
Rare spot

The Peas have a rare spot in hip-hop.

Separate in themes and vibe from the gangsta scene that long dominated rap, the group found it hard in the 1990s to capture a mass audience.

While they were waiting for "positive" hip-hop to make its mark in America, they toured the rest of the world, which most rappers ignore or find unwelcoming.

"The world caught on before the United States caught on, and the beauty of being able to travel the world was that we turned around that whole concept that you have to be big here first," Taboo said.

"In Vietnam, we can go and get big audiences, and we've been going there for so long. A lot of other hip-hop groups don't even go.

"And that helps with the advertising, too. We have a global audience ... we travel, and our name travels."
 
Fresh off a Grammy win in February, the band comes home on a career trajectory that has made it one of the stars of the moment in music.

The Peas had the fifth-best-selling album of last year in the United States, and their appeal to young music consumers is clear in the fact that their song My Humps is the first master ring-tone to break the threshold of 2 million tones sold.

Lively style

The Peas sound is a lively, buoyant style of hip-hop that melds Will's rapid-fire rhymes and Fergie's wavering singing.

The shows and videos feature break-dancing and graffiti art, a nod to their devotion to the early ethos of hip-hop, before the gangsta imagery took centrestage in the genre.

Apl said that has paid off by making them seem fresh amid a rap scene.

"The beauty is, too, that we go around the world, and good music and good dancing translates everywhere, but a lot of that bling stuff doesn't really reach people," Apl says.  

"There was a balance before between (gangsta and non-gangsta) stuff like N.W.A. and A Tribe Called Quest. Now that balance is coming back."
 
"Are we in Santa Monica? Are we in San Juan Capistrano? Are we in San Luis Obispo?" Will was shouting into the microphone on a bayside stage at the Embarcadero in San Diego.

The crowd, mostly young girls and dotted with parents and their dancing children, cheered back that, no, the Peas were in San Diego. "I know we're not in L.A.,'' Fergie chimed in.

The future
 
Even before taking the stage in San Diego, Will was mapping out his return to Los Angeles.

The plan was simple: Hit the studio, play two marathon shows at the Gibson and maybe get Brazilian food at a favorite spot.

The rest of the Peas "will be hitting the parties," Will said with a trace of resignation, but then he smiled brightly.
 
"My after-party will be in 10 years, and it will be sick. I'll have to buy an island for my party. Until then, I got to keep working."

Will spun his chair back to face his computer screen. "Work, work, work."