Courtney Love has gone through several phases throughout her long and storied career as a public figure. She, along with her band Hole, caught everyone's attention in 1991 with the raw, confrontational album Pretty on the Inside and later launched her acting career in films like The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon. 

But perhaps Love's most interesting days were when she was climbing the ladder of celebrity status around Hole's second album, Live Through This, released just days after Kurt Cobain took his own life.

Looking back at this time in Love's life 20 years after the fact makes the narrative we bought into back then – of Love being an attention-starved ham maybe acting out more than everyone thinks she should have in the wake of her husband's death – seem a little cynical. We can't help but wonder if she wasn't just reacting to the cameras that became so ubiquitous in her life while she was also trying to deal with becoming a widow and raising a baby.

Hole's performance at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards eschewed the typical theatricality of most other VMA performances in favor of rage and volume. Of course, her unscripted entrance into Kurt Loder's post-show interview with Madonna doesn't do much to dispel the notion that Love was overly fond of attention at the time.

Courtney Love Interrupts Madonna's Pre-Show Interview at the 1995 MTV VMAs

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