Madonna and Courtney Love have long been forces in music and pop culture. So when these two forces clashed at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, it was destined to go down in pop culture history. It all started when Madonna was being interviewed on MTV after the show when, all of a sudden, compact mirrors were being hurled at her and host Kurt Loder from down below. The mirrors had been thrown by Love, with Loder inviting her to come up, much to Madonna’s dismay. “Courtney Love is in dire need of attention right now,” Madonna quipped as Love made her way up the stairs.
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What happens next is a disjointed conversation between a disoriented Love and a confused Madonna. Love’s crush on Dennis Miller (“I like funny guys, I’m smart,” Love said), comparing dating within the music industry to surgeons dating other hospital staff members, and seeing who has the better pair of shoes are among the topics discussed. “I’m so over the rock star thing,” Love said of dating men who are musicians, asking Madonna, “But you don’t even do rock stars, as Michael Stipe would say, you dip into the population right?” which she then compared to working in a hospital and dating an EMT.
“I think you should get out of the hospital,” Madonna replied.
“No man, I like it in here. Nice clothes, good money,” Love smiled.
“And a lot of available drugs,” Madonna said. The interview ends after Love tells the story of how she and her late husband Kurt Cobain had gone to see Madonna’s 1991 documentary, Truth or Dare, and he told her, “Jesus, that’s you” in response to a line from Warren Beaty who says, “What doesn’t belong on camera?” Madonna is then whisked off by her team, but not before giving Love a friendly hug and kiss.
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“Well, it all ended well,” Loder concludes, continuing to interview Love solo. Days after the chaotic encounter, Love spoke to New York Daily News and said that there wasn’t much of a feud going on between them. Madonna sent flowers to Love after Cobain committed suicide in 1994, and Love alleged that she had called Madonna months before the MTV VMAs.
“I’d heard she was really depressed. She answered her phone and I knew it was her, but she said, ‘Um, this is Madonna’s assistant,'” Love explained. “So I said, ‘Okay, this is Courtney Love’s assistant, and Courtney just wanted to say that she heard Madonna was depressed and that she hopes she feels better soon.’ So then Madonna said, ‘Madonna thinks that’s really sweet. That’s really nice.'”
“I like her. I think she’s funny,” Love continued. “We’ve had our differences but that’s in the past. I play rock. Madonna’s never even listened to Led Zeppelin. Every decade has its big star, and Madonna was it in the ’80s. But the ’80s are over.”
Love and Madonna were later photographed together in 1997 at a party for Maverick Records, a record label and publishing company Madonna formerly owned. In fact, Madonna had wanted to sign Hole, the grunge band that Love was the lead singer of, to Maverick in the early 1990s, but Love turned down the offer.
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