GABRIEL FINISHES FIRST, LOU COMES UNGLUED

Since more and more videos seem to shy away from concepts and settle for lip-syncing, this month’s top two videos are all the more welcome. In them, Peter Gabriel’s and Lou Reed’s directors put them through some heavy changes with eye-catching results.

Ratings system: 80-100, don’t miss; 60-79, recommended; 40-59, watchable; 20-39, weak; 0-19, wretched.

SPOTLIGHT VIDEO:

Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer.” OK, folks, this may be it: The Best Music Video Ever Made. Well, something must be, and this endlessly inventive, fascinating and funny special-effects spectacle is my nominee.

“I’ll be anything you need,” Gabriel sings in the first single from his new album (reviewed in Record Rack, Page 59), and the director took him at his word. Stop-action photography (including some clay animation) puts Gabriel through a series of transformations: from simply mussing his hair and changing his color to having fish swim through his ears, being bumped by mini-bumper cars, getting frozen, and changing into a fruit salad. Sounds silly? You bet it is, but wonderfully so.

Unlike the memorable “Shock the Monkey” video that Gabriel did with Brian Grant, the permutations aren’t nightmarish, though some are cartoonishly violent. The whole altered-state fun ride is capped by Gabriel’s celebratory dance with a bunch of people and a roomful of furniture, and then a final segue to a spirit-of-the-night sky. The images here (many of them inspired by the song’s playful exaggeration of soul-music sex metaphors) are so witty and they fly by so fast that you can watch this video again and again, discovering something new each time. Director: Steven Johnson. Special effects: Tom and Stephen Quay. 100