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Where were you, gen X and older millennials, as Courtney Love Madonna in a live interview with Kurt Loder after the MTV Video Music Awards 1995 so awkward interrupted? Eduardo Braniff was literally in the middle of it. As a MTV employee in middle management, he was the defined talent companion for Love and her band Hole at the 11th VMAS in the Radio City Music Hall in New York on September 7, 1995.
A clash of two icons
Braniff says that he was “accidentally” divided for the support of the band during rehearsals and show night. Colleagues knew that he was cleverly in dealing with “let’s say dynamic” artists, but nobody suspected that Love would write pop culture history that evening: After threw Madonna and Loder out of her handbag with powder boxes, she interfered in her conversation-live outside on a platform at the venue.
The encounter between two completely different icons – Madonna floated, not to invite Love, and joked: “Courtney Love urgently needs attention” – went viral, a decade before there was YouTube or Twitter. It was a cool forerunner of Kanye Wests and Taylor Swift’s debacle in 2009. On one evening at which MTV was at his climax, there were wild, almost forgotten moments: The Notorious Big and Bill Bellamy (remember?) Michael and Janet Jackson presented a Moonman for “Scream” as the best dance video; Janet wore a “Pervert” t-shirt that was widely understood as a swipe on the allegations against her brother. But nothing could keep up with this post-show scene.
The two women were in very different professional and personal phases. Madonna experienced her second superstar decade, celebrated her fourth Moonman with “Take a Bow”, had made the comeback after the headwind against “Erotica” and her “sex” book and prepared for her dream role in Evita. (Maternity and “Ray of Light” were still a few years away.) It has always been formative at the VMAs: from the debut with “Like a Virgin” 1984, about “Vogue” in Marie-Antoinette decoration in 1990 until her reconciliation appearance with David Letterman 1994.
Courtney Love – raw and unchecked
Love, on the other hand, was still on the way up, raw and undilited. A year later she got the full Hollywood glamor package with “The People vs. Larry Flynt”. But in 1995 only a year since her husband’s traumatic suicide had passed Kurt Cobain. Before the hole appearance with “Violet”, she dedicated the song Cobain, River Phoenix, the late Hole-Bassist Kristen Pfaff and other lost friends.
“For me, she was just high,” recalls Braniff. “”[Aber] She was rather invited to MTV because she found that the album was not promoted too little … she was frustrated. ” During the “chaotic” way back to the cars, she not only accompanied her band – Eric Erlandson, Patty Schemel and Melissa on the Maur – but also girlfriend Drew Barrymore, her daughter Frances Bean Cobain and a nanny. “It was a bit like cat hats,” says Braniff. “One of my cats ran away! No idea how she discovered Madonna out there, but she did it.”
“Artist-Rivalry Gold”
Braniff immediately suspected what would happen. “She heads for Kurt and Madonna, wants to give the full Courtney,” he recalls. “She has something to say, she wants to deliver a show. I thought: should I really interrupt that now?” The producers decided: better not. “They knew that pure rivalry gold was being created here. Her thought was: ‘Let it run, it will be good.'”
And so it came: Love spoke to Madonna and Loder about shoes, comedian Dennis Miller and Alanis Morissette for four minutes. Love compared fame with hospital work: “I like it here. Good money!”
“And many available drugs!” Madonna hissed back. Before Madonna’s PR manager Liz Rosenberg pulled her away, there were still air kisses. (Later Love hugged MTV news presenter Tabitha Soren.)
A cartoon moment
“Madonna in Tom-Ford-Couture, Courtney in broken babydoll look,” says Braniff. “It was almost like a cartoon. The opposites could not have been drawn more clearly.”
Some other encounters followed-most famous in 1997 for the legendary Rolling-Stone cover “Women of Rock” with Tina Turner-but they never really got warm. “I don’t like her and she doesn’t like me,” Love 2024 told the standard. “I loved ‘susan desperately sought’, but more about New York than because of her.”
In retrospect, Kurt Loder called it a “wonderful TV moment” in 2023: “If you had to write it down later, it would have been terrible … If someone falls off the roof, it is wonderful television.” (Madonna never commented on the incident. Neither she nor Love reacted to this story on inquiries.)
“We love a good zoff,” says Braniff. “At that time there were not so many moments of rivalry because the media world was different. It was a perfect end to this evening and this time.”