Not for You

Not for you means the music is for the people, not a single person, especially YOU alone. So stop screaming at him, trying to call him, invading his privacy. You wouldnt like someone invading yours! (IF you hate something dont do it too) Go out enjoy your youth. With no power you had nothing to do, he still remembers, don't you? Unfortunatley, Ed is famous, and will never be left alone. I think now he has accepted that, but when he wrote this he didn't.

I think benplace and dimitri are right..... as it says here: db.etree.org/shn/20183 Ed said the song is directed towards ".....someone who thinks they're more important than the people making the music; the people listening to the music; or the music itself. And this is just a reminder that they're not."

i thought it said like muhammad its the truth

Starting of the song brings up a great point. It's like he's telling everybody that you also do things that you accuse me of doing. "Like Muhammad hits the truth"

i believe its about the media and fans invading his life

i think you guys already got the meaning down for the most part. i think its about people who call them selves fans because they know a few songs or because, at that time, grunge was the big thing.

i think this song is basically saying eddie doesnt care what the media thinks and what the fairweather fans think because he doesnt write music for them. he writes it for the true fans who know more songs than just alive, jeremy, and yellow ledbedder.

although i wouldn't know half of what i know about grunge had it not have been for "seymour jugs" ...sorry, had to give credit where credit is due.

Okay so I posted basically the exact same thing twice, 2 months apart. Great.

Vocalist Eddie Vedder about "Not for You":\n\nI believe...that there is something sacred about youth, and the song is about how youth is being sold and exploited. I think I felt like I had become part of that too. Maybe that\'s why sometimes I have a hard time with the TV end of music and much of the media and the magazines. When I pick up a magazine, I just count how many pages of ads before the first article starts. You go one, two...up to fifteen to twenty or more. And then in the back you have phone sex ads. So I\'ve pretty much had it. I don\'t want to be the traveling medicine show where we go out and do the song and dance and someone else drops the back of the wagon and starts selling crap. I don\'t want our music to sell anything—or anyone else use it. There are a lot of middlemen, somewhere between the band and the audience. I know you need some people to help facilitate things for the live show, and I\'m not saying that I don\'t appreciate these people but...In the last ten or fifteen years, there have been a lot of changes in music, and somehow the percentages being charged [by the concert industry] got out of hand. We also don\'t want to be part of all the marketing tools or whatever, but believe me, we have been. [That happened] on the first album and that\'s probably why we are where we are now, but it was hell and I feel awful about it and I\'m not going to do it anymore.\n\nIn another interview, Vedder stated:\n\nThese attitudes out there...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 they think it belongs to them. That\'s probably what "Not for You" is about.

definitely autobiographical. i have a tape of it live, and he says "small my table, it seats just two, me and beth" (beth is his wife). that sums up the song. his life consists of him and his wife, and anyone else is just butting in.

All that's sacred comes from youth Dedication, naive and true With no power, nothing to do

im wondering what he means by that