The 1980's boom in rock videos were aimed primarily at television audiences and was detrimental to the cinema feature, gone were the days of rock-and-roll movies that were based around a band or its leading performer, though there wasn't a shortage of films that used rock music as soundtrack selling-points. Most typical of these was the pablum picture Party Party from 1983, which featured top British acts and the more widely screened Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1983) which featured top American ones.
Later that year, Staying Alive attempted to repeat the success of Saturday Night Fever (1977) but failed abysmally, though the films Flashdance and 1984s Breakin' were testament that audiences were still very much interested in being kept abreast of the latest dance craze.
More interesting from the technical, if not the musical or aesthetic points of view, were Ralph Bakshi's cartoon feature American Pop (1981) and Pink Floyd - The Wall (1982), which also utilized animation to interesting effect. However in the year that Orwell immortalized, Prince showed that the rock star's studied charisma could still carry a feature with Purple Rain and Rob Reiner provided a welcome breath of fresh air with This is Spinal Tap, a deadpan lampoon of the rock documentary in general and 'progressive' rock in particular laden with inside-humor.