Watch out for flying make-up! It’s been 30 years, and we’re nonetheless shocked by this basic VMAs second: After the Video Music Awards on September 7, 1995, MTV Information’ Kurt Loder was speaking with Madonna on a platform exterior NYC’s Radio Metropolis Music Corridor when somebody began pelting them from under with compacts. It was Gap frontwoman Courtney Love, and regardless of the Gucci-clad Madonna’s protests (“No, don’t, please!”), Loder invited her to climb up and be part of the interview. The disjointed, principally one-sided dialog that adopted and aired dwell world wide — “Courtney Love is in dire want of consideration proper now,” Madonna quipped — went viral earlier than that was a factor.
Who Was Concerned
Madonna, now 67, had been one of many world’s most well-known folks for a decade already, and that night time she gained her fourth Moonman for “Take a Bow.” She and Rolling Stone vet Loder, 80, had at all times had a flirty chemistry: “I assumed she was terrific and she or he was humorous to work together with,” he stated in 2023. “She was sassy generally, perhaps nasty.” Kurt Cobain’s widow Love, 61, was newer to the highlight, way more uncooked and punk. In her entourage: the remainder of Gap (they’d carried out “Violet” earlier), daughter Frances Bean Cobain, a nanny and Drew Barrymore, in keeping with then–MTV exec Eduardo Braniff, the group’s expertise escort. “Like herding cats!” he tells Us.
Why We Bear in mind It
When Love first “darted away,” Braniff says, producers “knew there was some artist-rivalry gold within the making. [I thought], ‘I don’t know if I need to interrupt this.’” Identical for Loder, who recalled, “There was any individual in my ear saying, ‘Get her up right here.’”
Through the chaotic 4 minutes, Love ignored private house because the beforehand acquainted pair in contrast sneakers and chatted about Alanis Morissette and comedian Dennis Miller. Love additionally rambled by means of an analogy about fame and dealing at a hospital. “I prefer it right here. Good cash,” she stated.
“And plenty of out there medicine!” Madonna sniped. Then she was rescued by her rep, air-kissed Love and departed. This unmanufactured conflict of the Queens of Pop and Grunge “was a beautiful second,” Loder recalled. “If any individual falls off the highest of a constructing, it’s fantastic tv.” Lately, it’s a riveting YouTube clip.
Key Particulars
Braniff characterizes Love as “nothing however tremendous cordial” to him, however “she was loaded for bear with MTV, pondering that they had not accomplished sufficient to advertise the album.” As soon as she “clocked” Loder and Madonna, “she [wanted] to be extraordinary Courtney — she had one thing to share, a present to present.”
The Aftermath
In a 1996 diary entry for Self-importance Truthful, Madonna wrote of a dream during which Love waved a gun at her and ’90s star Sharon Stone: “One more reason to not take Xanax to sleep.” In 1997, the ladies reunited at a celebration and shot a Rolling Stone cowl with Tina Turner, however a friendship by no means developed. (On the shoot, they beefed over music and needed to take turns selecting what performed.)
A New Perspective
Going down throughout MTV’s monocultural peak, when the community truly performed movies, the téte-â-téte served as a cooler Gen X prelude to Kanye West and Taylor Swift’s 2009 VMAs incident, if not the continued Drake–Kendrick Lamar feud. “Listed here are these two megawatt artists in numerous arenas going through off,” Braniff says. “All of us love a superb rivalry, and that one was simply so iconic.”
The place Are They Now?
The final Gap album dropped in 2010; Love resides in London full-time. As lately as final yr, she stated of Madonna, “I don’t like her and she or he doesn’t like me.” Mom of six and full-on pop icon Madonna simply launched the remix album Veronica Electronica. A Julia Garner movie and different tasks on her life have been percolating. No phrase on casting Love.
