The Pinnacle of MTV News Came During This 6 Minute Stretch Of Unhinged Madness When Kurt Loder, Madonna, and Courtney Love Traded Barbs

MTV News was put down this week, Old Yeller style, as part of a massive cost-cutting effort at Paramount Media Networks. For those of us in Generation X, the news felt like hearing about the death of an old friend. But sometimes grief gives you a gift. Sometimes, amid the waves of sadness, a memory bubbles to the surface. A vivid moment dislodges itself from a corner of your hippocampus, a scene plays like a movie in your head. It’s of your friend as you want to remember him, and it brings you comfort. 

What I’m saying is this: When I heard MTV News had died, I texted with a few old colleagues, and then I said to myself: I’d better watch that segment when Courtney Love crashes Kurt Loder’s interview with Madonna after the 1995 Video Music Awards. 

It’s on YouTube, which is what we have now instead of a functioning long-term memory. Let’s watch it together. For closure. 

You must remember that in September of 1995, everybody in this video, and every brand and project they represented, were absolutely firing on all cylinders. MTV was on an upswing fueled by Singled Out, The State, and Beavis & Butthead, whose first movie Beavis & Butthead Do America was in production, and whose Season 5 episode “Here Comes The Bride’s Butt” had just aired. MTV News was the angel sitting on the network’s shoulder, countering the crassness with a murderers’ row of correspondents like Tabitha Soren, Alison Stewart, and Chris Connelly, and leaning into the crassness with oddly thoughtful specials like Sex In The ‘90s. Kurt Loder was continuing to do the coolest job in the world with his bespoke combination of authority and aloofness. 

Madonna was in her twelfth year of fame, her tenth of unimaginable blinding fame, and either her sixth or seventh reinvention, depending on whether you consider “Justify My Love” and the Erotica album two separate eras. (They are.) At this moment, she is about to begin her Evita chapter, she is clearly workshopping a new accent, and her hair is volumized by what may be a primitive version of a “Bumpit.” She has just won her first individual Video Music Award as an artist; after a few technical Moonmen and the 1986 Video Vanguard Award, she finally won Best Female Video in 1995 for “Take A Bow.” It was only the 12th annual one of these awards ceremonies, but that still feels wrong. 

It also feels wrong for Hole to have been introduced by Dennis Miller, but he was the host, and that’s how these things went. Courtney Love and the band have just performed a ferocious version of “Violet” at the awards, dedicated to Kurt Cobain, late Hole bass player Kristin Pfaff, River Phoenix, and an alarmingly-long roll call of dead friends. It’s difficult to know exactly what is fueling Courtney Love as this clip kicks off, and it would be libelous to guess. But she is ready to throw down. 

As we begin, Kurt is trying to get the show on the road, talking to his staff in a tone that is part playful and part serious and all Kurt. He and Madonna have always had an easy rapport, and so it is here, as she quips, and holds court, and works hard at softening her Michigan vowels. 

And then comes the compact. It sails over Madonna’s head, by an act of divine intervention, and it lands in front of her. She stares at it for a moment, and in that moment, she knows. Very few would be allowed within purse-contents-throwing distance of the MTV News stage, and only one of that very few would dare. It is Courtney, and she is on one. 

“Hi, Courtney,” says Kurt, sunnily. Now, Kurt could stop this from happening. One subtle swipe of his fingers across his throat would have signaled a nearby producer to whisper into her headset, and that whisper would make a producer at street level walk Courtney away. But he does not, because he is too good a newsman for that. He can control the chaos, and the audience is hungry for it. “Should we let her come up,” asks Madonna, in a tone that says “We should not let her come up.” Kurt says “Yeah,” with as much unbridled joy as we’ve ever heard from him. 

“Courtney Love is in dire need of attention right now,” says Madonna, and the speed with which Courtney takes those spiral stairs confirms that assessment. Courtney staggers around the corner and into the two-shot, calls Kurt “such a Donna Karan man,” and then kind of speaks in tongues for a few seconds. If you are a young person who is watching this happen live, you say out loud, “Oh, fuck yes.” 

But we are just getting started. 

Kurt asks whether this is the first time the two have met, and while it technically may be, Madonna and Courtney have a history. Courtney says as much, when she regains the power of speech. “I used to know her A&R guy,” she says. Like absolutely nothing else in or around any Video Music Awards, this is an understatement. In 1991, Madonna was in the early stages of starting the label that would become Maverick, and Guy Oseary, the then-teenager who would become her A&R man, saw Hole live and begged Madonna to sign her. We don’t know whether Madonna shared Oseary’s enthusiasm, but we do know Courtney did not. As she told Vanity Fair in 1992: “Madonna’s interest in me was kind of like Dracula’s interest in his latest victim.” So that deal did not work out. “But Alanis,” Courtney says, referring to Alanis Morissette, Maverick’s first massive artist, then on single number five from Jagged Little Pill (“Head Over Feet”), “there are some pipes.” 

“Madonna’s interest in me was kind of like Dracula’s interest in his latest victim.”—Courtney Love

Through this, Madonna is shaken, which you almost never see. Here is how I know: the producers behind the camera have to remind her to speak into her microphone. Madonna. Truth or Dare Madonna. Sex book Madonna. Has to be reminded to speak into the device that makes it so you can hear her talk. That is a person who has been thrown off her game. That is what you call a tell. 

There is some talk about Madonna missing Hole’s performance, and some talk about Courtney telling Dennis Miller to “tone it down about me and Drew,” which must be Drew Barrymore, who presented the Video Vanguard Award to R.E.M that night. Drew had done Playboy earlier that year, and would do Scream the next, so she was probably in the final weeks of the period in which it was considered acceptable to make self-destructive-former-child-star jokes about her in awards-show monologues. I will tell you this: nobody at this moment in cultural history saw The Drew Barrymore Show coming. Anyway, Drew does not make an appearance here, and that is for the best. 

Courtney goes on to say that she is finished dating rock stars, and she says this in a very Courtney way: a long and wandering monologue that needs to be transcribed to be believed. “It’s like working in the hospital, but like going out with the ambulance driver, but you’re like ‘I want to be a surgeon,’ and then I want to be the top surgeon, and then damn, I want to own the hospital, so like, I go out with the other surgeons, they’re assholes, right? So like, maybe I should try a candy striper.” Yes, this is how it works: you become a surgeon because you know people at the hospital, and then you become such a good surgeon that they give you the deed to the whole thing. Flawless, 10/10, no notes, could not be replicated by ChatGPT. 

Neither could Madonna’s reply: “I think you should get out of the hospital.” Ouch. Madonna is back. Courtney says, “No man, I like it in here, nice clothes, good money…” because she is out of the metaphor and back to the music-industry world that Fiona Apple would call bullshit at the next VMAs. Madonna fires back, because her head is still in the hospital: “And a lot of available drugs.” 

There is then some talk of shoes, and whose are the best, and whether Kurt’s are PETA-friendly, but Madonna’s shoes are Gucci and she has stuck the landing in them. She fires a look to her off-camera publicist that clearly says “Get me the fuck out of here and make it look like your idea,” and in an instant it is done. “Well, that went well,” says Kurt, and Kurt, you got that right. 

It was peak MTV News, it was peak Madonna, and though I have never spent time with Courtney Love, I would imagine it was Courtney Love at about a 5. We won’t see this kind of unhinged chaos on television again, except maybe at all of the presidential debates next year.

MTV News, rest in power. Late-stage capitalism, go on, take everything, take everything, take everything. 

Dave Holmes is an editor-at-large for Esquire.com, host of the Earwolf podcast Homophilia, and his memoir Party of One is in stores now.