Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation' Video Crashed Laptops

Microsoft has confirmed that Janet Jackson's video for Rhythm Nation had the capacity to crash certain laptops. The bizarre phenomenon was the byproduct of a technological coincidence relating to the frequency of the song, as Microsoft Chief Software Engineer Raymond Chen explains.

"It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used."

As the issue was auditory, Chen confirmed that the quirk not only had the power to crash the laptop playing the video but nearby devices as well. 

"One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video!"

Chen goes on to say that a workaround for the unusual dilemma was found, with the laptop manufcaturer creating a custom filter to prevent further laptop destruction. 

"The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback."

You can watch the offending video below, but maybe make sure you aren't watching it on a laptop with one of those 5400 rpm laptop hard drives.

Rhythm Nation appears on Janet Jackson's fourth full-length solo album,  1989's Rhythm Nation 1814. The album peaked at number one in the US and Australia, with the Rhythm Nation single peaking at number two in the USA and number fifty-six in Australia. Rhythm Nation 1814 was written and produced by Jackson, in collaboration with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Jackson developed the song's concept in response to various tragedies in the media, deciding to pursue a socially conscious theme by using a political standpoint within upbeat dance music.