Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' Won 9 MTV Awards in 1987 and Is Considered Greatest Music Video Ever Made

In 1986, a musician laid under a glass sheet for 16 hours while animators moved tiny objects across his face one frame at a time. (Now that's what we call an artist). The result changed what anyone thought a music video could be — and nearly 40 years later, nothing has come close to topping it.

Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" is the greatest rock music video ever made, according to a ranking put together by classical-music.com.

Released as a single from Gabriel's fifth studio album So, "Sledgehammer" arrived at a moment when music videos were still largely performance clips or simple narrative affairs. What Gabriel and director Stephen R. Johnson — working alongside Aardman Animations, the British studio that would later give the world Wallace & Gromit — delivered instead was something that had no precedent and has had no equal since.

What Makes It the Greatest Music Video of All Time

The video transforms Gabriel's face and body into a living canvas for stop-motion wizardry. Trains run across his head. Chickens dance in synchronized formation. Fruit bursts into kaleidoscopic explosions. Every single frame is a new invention — a new visual idea executed with the kind of painstaking precision that could only come from a team willing to work one frame at a time over the course of an entire week. And it was all done well before the modern advances of technology existed to make things easier.

What makes it remarkable is that none of the visual chaos distracts from the song itself. The joyous funk of "Sledgehammer" and the surreal stop-motion imagery don't compete, they amplify each other, creating something that is simultaneously absurd and completely coherent. Playful, inventive and endlessly creative, it showed that music videos could be works of art in their own right rather than promotional afterthoughts.

The Most-Played Video in MTV History

At the time of its release, "Sledgehammer" became the most-played video in MTV history, which was a remarkable achievement in an era when MTV was the undisputed center of popular music culture. At the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards, it won nine awards in a single night, a record that has never been broken. Best Video of the Year, Best Direction, Best Special Effects, Best Editing, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Male Video, Viewer's Choice and Best Overall Performance — nine categories, nine wins.

No video before or since has dominated the VMAs the way "Sledgehammer" did that night.