The 2020s File Feature
Underdog
Underdog: Alicia Keys, the 2020 Super Bowl, and a Chart Journey Built on Resilience "Underdog" is a piano-driven anthemic pop song by Alicia Keys, released o…
01 The Story
Underdog: Alicia Keys, the 2020 Super Bowl, and a Chart Journey Built on Resilience
"Underdog" is a piano-driven anthemic pop song by Alicia Keys, released on February 7, 2020, the same day she performed at the Super Bowl LIV halftime show in Miami. The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 93 that same day, buoyed by the enormous television audience and the promotional boost of one of the most-watched annual broadcasts in American television history. The track's chart journey was unusual in its structure: after its initial debut, it disappeared from the chart before returning at its peak position of number 69 on April 11, 2020, then spending additional weeks at positions 79, 81, and 94 before completing its five-week total Hot 100 appearance.
Alicia Keys, born Alicia Augello Cook on January 25, 1981, in Manhattan, New York, had by 2020 been one of the most celebrated artists in contemporary music for nearly two decades. Her debut album Songs in A Minor, released in June 2001, had produced the massive hit "Fallin'" and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling more than 236,000 copies in its first week, a record for a female artist's debut at that time. In the years that followed, Keys established herself as one of the most technically accomplished pianists and vocalists in mainstream pop and R&B, winning 15 Grammy Awards across her career and maintaining a consistent commercial and critical presence across multiple albums.
The release strategy for "Underdog" was carefully designed around the Super Bowl appearance. Keys had been announced as a performer at the halftime show, and the release of "Underdog" on the same day as the broadcast transformed her performance into a promotional event for the new material. The halftime show at Super Bowl LIV, held at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, was headlined by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, with Keys performing during the opening of the show. Her performance brought "Underdog" to an immediate massive audience, explaining its debut chart entry despite limited radio promotion at that stage.
The song's production was co-written by Alicia Keys alongside Eid Harmon and Billy Walsh, and it was produced with the kind of sweeping, emotionally direct instrumentation that characterizes Keys's most commercially oriented material. The track's piano foundation, characteristic of her artistic identity since her debut, was framed by orchestral elements and a production approach designed to make the song feel simultaneously intimate and stadium-sized. This balance between personal statement and mass-scale delivery is a distinctive challenge in pop production, and "Underdog" handled it with the assurance of an artist who had been operating at that scale for many years.
"Underdog" was the lead single from Keys's seventh studio album, Alicia, which was released on September 18, 2020. The album represented a return to some of Keys's most artistically grounded instincts, emphasizing live instrumentation, emotional directness, and thematic depth over the more polished commercial sheen of some of her earlier releases. The timing of the album's release, in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic that had fundamentally disrupted the music industry and daily life, gave the album's messages of resilience and community additional resonance that Keys acknowledged in her promotional interviews.
The song accumulated 64 million YouTube views over the years following its release, a figure that reflected continued discovery through the streaming ecosystem and the track's use in various inspirational and social media contexts where its anthemic message about the power of underdogs and ordinary people resonated particularly well. The gap between its modest Hot 100 performance and its substantial YouTube engagement reflected a broader pattern in which Keys's post-2010 material was consumed voraciously by her large and loyal streaming audience without necessarily generating the radio-driven chart dominance that had characterized her early career.
The second surge in the song's chart activity, which produced its peak position at number 69 in April 2020, coincided with the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in the United States. During those weeks, music with messages of hope, resilience, and collective strength found audiences that were navigating genuine fear and uncertainty, and "Underdog" was among the tracks that benefited from this atmospheric resonance. The song's themes of fighting against adversity and believing in the possibility of triumph against the odds connected powerfully with listeners experiencing a moment of collective vulnerability.
The Hot 100's methodology, which weights streaming, radio airplay, and digital sales, meant that "Underdog" faced a structural challenge in building the radio airplay component of its chart score. Contemporary pop and R&B radio had by 2020 become increasingly focused on artists and sounds that skewed younger, and Keys's traditional piano-driven approach was not necessarily a priority for programmers targeting 18-34 demographics. This limited her radio airplay support and capped her Hot 100 performance below what her streaming audience might otherwise have supported.
Keys's status as a co-host of the Grammy Awards, a role she performed in 2019 and 2020, kept her visible in mainstream media during the period of "Underdog's" release and promotional campaign. Her Grammy hosting performances, which combined musical ability with warmth and humor, reminded television audiences of her talents and likely contributed to the song's streaming discovery by listeners who encountered her through the Grammy broadcast and followed up on her new material.
Legacy of Underdog and the Alicia Album Cycle
Within the arc of Keys's discography, "Underdog" marked a return to the kind of emotionally direct, piano-anchored songwriting that had defined her early career. The song's peak of number 69 on the Hot 100 and its five-week chart presence were modest by the standards of her commercial peak period in the early-to-mid 2000s, but they demonstrated that she retained a significant audience committed to her musical vision. The track's continued streaming presence and its frequent appearance in playlists oriented around motivation and resilience suggest that "Underdog" found the audience it was intended for, even if that audience expressed its support through streaming consumption rather than traditional chart metrics that would have registered more strongly in a different era of music consumption.
02 Song Meaning
Resilience, Collective Identity, and the Spirit of the Underdog in Alicia Keys's 2020 Anthem
"Underdog" addresses one of popular music's most enduring and emotionally resonant themes: the capacity of individuals and communities who have been dismissed, overlooked, or disadvantaged to rise above those circumstances through determination, belief, and mutual support. The song constructs a narrative of collective resilience that is simultaneously personal and universal, speaking directly to the experiences of people who feel marginalized while also articulating a broader social vision of inclusivity and democratic dignity.
The concept of the underdog carries specific cultural meaning in American society, where the mythology of the self-made individual who succeeds against the odds despite starting from a position of disadvantage is deeply embedded in national identity. "Underdog" taps into this mythology while also interrogating it, acknowledging the real difficulties that disadvantaged people face rather than simply invoking the triumph narrative without recognizing the struggle. Alicia Keys's delivery communicates genuine empathy for those she is addressing, not from a position of distance or condescension but from an apparent shared understanding of what it means to be underestimated.
Keys's biographical positioning contributes to the song's authenticity. As a Black woman who achieved extraordinary success in an industry that has historically undervalued both Blackness and femininity, her invocation of the underdog narrative carries weight that a different artist might not be able to claim as credibly. Her life story, from a gifted child raised by a single mother in New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood to one of the most decorated artists in pop history, embodies the narrative she sings about in ways that reinforce the song's emotional impact.
The musical setting of "Underdog" uses the full expressive range of Keys's characteristic piano-driven production to create an atmosphere of both vulnerability and strength. The piano, an instrument that carries associations with both formal classical training and the raw emotional expression of gospel and blues, functions perfectly as the vehicle for this particular set of themes. The instrument's dual heritage, simultaneously elite and communal, reflects the song's own thematic ambivalence about success and struggle.
The release of "Underdog" in February 2020 and its chart resurgence in April 2020 gave the song an accidental temporal dimension that deepened its meaning for many listeners. The COVID-19 pandemic that struck the United States in March 2020 created conditions of genuine collective vulnerability and uncertainty that made the song's message of resilience and solidarity feel urgently relevant rather than abstractly aspirational. The people who were keeping society functioning during the pandemic lockdowns, healthcare workers, grocery store employees, delivery drivers, and other essential workers, were precisely the kind of overlooked, undervalued individuals that "Underdog" was written to celebrate.
This accidental resonance with the pandemic moment is worth noting not as a planned element of the song's meaning but as an example of how great thematic writing acquires additional dimensions over time as historical circumstances bring its concerns into new relief. Keys's consistent focus throughout her career on themes of empowerment, dignity, and the inner lives of ordinary people meant that "Underdog" was primed to speak to moments of collective stress, even though it was written before the specific crisis of 2020 had materialized.
The song's chorus functions as a kind of collective affirmation, a statement of solidarity between the singer and the various groups she catalogs in the verses. This cataloging of specific underdog figures, the immigrant, the single parent, the working-class dreamer, gives the song its democratic texture and prevents it from remaining at the level of vague inspirational uplift. By naming specific circumstances rather than gesturing toward a generic underdog abstraction, Keys grounds the song's message in social reality while retaining its broad emotional appeal.
The composition's structural arc reflects its thematic content. The song builds from intimate beginnings through increasingly expansive orchestration toward a climactic statement of collective triumph that feels genuinely earned rather than merely imposed by production convention. This arc mirrors the journey it describes: from a position of disadvantage through sustained effort toward an eventual recognition and success that the wider world had deemed unlikely.
The piano remains central throughout, even as the production expands around it. This anchoring of the song in its piano foundation is itself a thematic statement, asserting that Keys's core artistic identity, rooted in the instrument she has played since childhood, is the foundation on which all of her commercial success rests. The underdog who persevered, in this reading, is also Keys herself, who resisted pressure to abandon her piano-centered approach in favor of more fashionable production trends and whose sustained authenticity was ultimately vindicated by commercial and critical success over decades.
The song's continued relevance in motivational playlists, graduation ceremony contexts, and sports highlight reels suggests that its meaning has been successfully generalized beyond its specific 2020 context. "Underdog" now functions as a broadly applicable statement about human potential and collective solidarity that listeners can bring to their own circumstances, which is precisely what the best pop anthems achieve: they become vessels for experiences and emotions that their creators may not have specifically anticipated but that the themes were capacious enough to accommodate.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging