Beware of flying makeup! It's been 30 years, and we're still stunned by this classic VMAs moment: After the Video Music Awards on September 7, 1995, MTV News' Kurt Loder was talking with Madonna on a platform outside NYC's Radio City Music Hall when someone started pelting them from below with compacts. It was Hole frontwoman Courtney Love, and despite the Gucci-clad Madonna's protests ("No, don't, please!"), Loder invited her to climb up and join the interview. The disjointed, mostly one-sided conversation that followed and aired live around the world - "Courtney Love is in dire need of attention right now," Madonna quipped - went viral before that was a thing. Who Was Involved Madonna, now 67, had been one of the world's most famous people for a decade already, and that night she won her fourth Moonman for "Take a Bow." She and Rolling Stone vet Loder, 80, had always had a flirty chemistry: "I thought she was terrific and she was funny to interact with," he said in 2023. "She was sassy sometimes, maybe nasty." Kurt Cobain's widow Love, 61, was newer to the spotlight, much more raw and punk. In her entourage: the rest of Hole (they'd performed "Violet" earlier), daughter Frances Bean Cobain, a nanny and Drew Barrymore, according to then-MTV exec Eduardo Braniff, the group's talent escort. "Like herding cats!" he tells Us. Why We Remember It When Love first "darted away," Braniff says, producers "knew there was some artist-rivalry gold in the making. [I thought], 'I don't know if I want to interrupt this.'" Same for Loder, who recalled, "There was somebody in my ear saying, 'Get her up here.'" During the chaotic four minutes, Love ignored personal space as the previously acquainted pair compared shoes and chatted about Alanis Morissette and comic Dennis Miller. Love also rambled through an analogy about fame and working at a hospital. "I like it here. Good money," she said. Celebrity Feuds That Played Out at the VMAs "And a lot of available drugs!" Madonna sniped. Then she was rescued by her rep, air-kissed Love and departed. This unmanufactured clash of the Queens of Pop and Grunge "was a wonderful moment," Loder recalled. "If somebody falls off the top of a building, it's wonderful television." These days, it's a riveting YouTube clip. Key Details Braniff characterizes Love as "nothing but super cordial" to him, but "she was loaded for bear with MTV, thinking they had not done enough to promote the album." Once she "clocked" Loder and Madonna, "she [wanted] to be extraordinary Courtney - she had something to share, a show to give." The Aftermath In a 1996 diary entry for Vanity Fair, Madonna wrote of a dream in which Love waved a gun at her and '90s star Sharon Stone: "Another reason not to take Xanax to sleep." In 1997, the women reunited at a party and shot a Rolling Stone cover with Tina Turner, but a friendship never developed. (At the shoot, they beefed over music and had to take turns picking what played.) A New Perspective Taking place during MTV's monocultural peak, when the network actually played videos, the téte-â-téte served as a cooler Gen X prelude to Kanye West and Taylor Swift's 2009 VMAs incident, if not the ongoing Drake-Kendrick Lamar feud. "Here are these two megawatt artists in different arenas facing off," Braniff says. "We all love a good rivalry, and that one was just so iconic." MTV VMAs 2025 Nominations: See the Complete List Where Are They Now? The last Hole album dropped in 2010; Love resides in London full-time. As recently as last year, she said of Madonna, "I don't like her and she doesn't like me." Mother of six and full-on pop icon Madonna just released the remix album Veronica Electronica. A Julia Garner film and other projects on her life have been percolating. No word on casting Love.