Songfacts®:

• Public Service Announcements (PSAs) are messages from non-profits or government agencies that raise awareness or encourage good behavior - they might try to get us to recycle or wear sunscreen or eat healthier. In Jay-Z's Public Service Announcement, he's letting us know that he's still got that hustler spirit.
• "Public Service Announcement" didn't chart but is one of Jay-Z's most famous songs. It's a live favorite, played more than any of his others in concert. The song has a booming beat and is filled with clever rhymes and flows that show off Jay's talents as a writer and an MC.
• As you can tell from the intro ("This is a public service announcement sponsored by Just Blaze and the good folks at Roc-A-Fella records..."), the song was produced by Just Blaze. He went on to work with Usher, Rihanna, Beyoncé and lots of other big names.
• The title only shows up in the intro. The song is better known by the first line Jay raps: "Allow me to re-introduce myself."
  
  There's no chorus on the track - the verses are separated by spoken interludes.
• The main sample in the track is from a 1968 song called "Seed of Love" by Little Boy Blues. Just Blaze must have dug pretty deep into the crates to find it - Little Boy Blues was a lesser-known psychedelic rock band from the '60s. The piano lick he sampled comes midway through the song.
• Got the hottest chick in the game wearin' my chain
  
  That would be Beyoncé. She and Jay-Z were a new couple at the time and had yet to appear in public as dating. In their 2002 collaboration "'03 Bonnie And Clyde" they portray a romantic pair, but it wasn't clear if they were together in real life. This mention in Public Service Announcement is part of the slow roll-out of their relationship. Beyoncé isn't mentioned by name, but who else could possibly be the "hottest chick in the game"?
• "Public Service Announcement" is part of Jay-Z's eighth album, The Black Album, which he said would be his last. Jay wanted to spend more time running his Roc-A-Fella label and pursuing other ventures (he's a business, man), which he did, but he was drawn back to music a few years later and released his ninth album, Kingdom Come, in 2006.
  
  To celebrate his "retirement," Jay-Z held a concert at Madison Square Garden on November 25, 2003 (11 days after the album was released), where he premiered "Public Service Announcement" and other Black Album tracks.
• Both Clipse's "Number One Supplier" and Beanie Sigel's "All the Above" borrow lines from this song.
• Jay-Z wrote the second verse of this track after a journalist went over the top in interpreting the symbolism in one of Hova's outfits. He recalled to MTV News: "The second verse of 'PSA' may not have that many hidden jewels in [it], but the story behind why I wrote the second verse is pretty interesting. It's sort of that look on rap, how this writer had written this article about me wearing this Che Guevara shirt [with a] Jesus piece, and she was like, 'The Jesus piece is hitting his head,' and I was like, 'You're going a little too far. It's a T-shirt and a chain. It's not literally hitting his forehead. That [experience] inspired the entire verse. 'I'm like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex.'"
• Google used "Public Service Announcement" in commercials for their Gemini AI assistant that aired during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson from the US Olympic team appears.