Songfacts®:

• Pearl Jam was blindingly famous by 1994, which drew many unwelcome industry types into their ambit. This song is lead singer Eddie Vedder's reaction, letting these folks know that Pearl Jam is not for them.
• Eddie Vedder doesn't often go into detail about his songs, but with this one, he had a lot to get off his chest, especially after Time magazine put him on the cover without his consent under the headline, "All The Rage." Vedder offered this explanation to Spin Magazine, December 1994: "It's not that we want to take credit. That's fine. I don't care. I don't want credit, it's not like I'm trying to claim that. But when they start acting like they own you that they are the reason... that's something that's not true. These attitudes out there that the music is theirs that it's the industry's music, and it's not. It's mine. And it's yours. Whoever's listening to it. It's mine and it's yours. And everybody in between, they're the distributors. I think that something like a music channel can be very powerful. Sometimes they think they're the ones who decide what's heard. I think that's a dangerous situation. And, I think, what's more dangerous is that thy think it belongs to them. That's probably what 'Not For You is about.'
  
  I get pissed off if I see someone's picture everywhere: on the cover of this, on the back of that, in ads, in sound bites on TV. I start to hate that person, whether I've heard their music or not. And so I've really tried to hold back from doing that stuff. I think that's what pissed me off about Time magazine, when I didn't have to agree to be on their cover in order for them to put me on it. I felt like, f--k, I'm gonna be that guy I hate whether I want to or not. And pretty soon, I'm gonna be an icon that can just be joked about. I'm too sensitive to that kind of stuff. I did my best to hold us back from becoming that, at least after witnessing what happened on the first record. I thought for the second record we were pretty mellow. We took ourselves off TV. But I still feel like we're that band that everybody hates." >>>

  Suggestion credit:
  Saint - New Orleans, LA
• "Not For You" was released as a single from Pearl Jam's third album, Vitalogy. It bubbled under at #102 in the US, fitting considering the song's subject matter.
  
  Pearl Jam was never a singles band, and many of the singles they did release in America were only to promote the albums - they weren't sold in stores, making them ineligible for the Hot 100. You could buy "Not For You" though, and enough people did that it grazed the chart. Fans, of course, got the song on the album, which went to #1 and sold over 5 million copies.
• Pearl Jam played this song live in March and April 1994, long before the album was released in November. They included it in their Saturday Night Live set on April 16, 1994.