Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" music video was able to crash laptops

Earlier this week Microsoft's Raymond Chen shared a new blog post about a story he was told by a colleague about their days working in Windows XP product support, and how Janet Jackson's music video for her 1989 single "Rhythm Nation" was able to crash certain laptops.

Chen wrote, "A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement."

One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops," Chen continued. "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 revealed that the issue was caused because the "song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used," and 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."