Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation” had the power to crash laptops, according to a tale recently shared on a Microsoft blog.
Raymond Chen, a software engineer at the company, wrote about the issue he heard from “a colleague” involved in Windows XP product support.
“A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops,” Chen wrote. “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 added: “I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.”
The problem, he explained, was that Jackson’s song “contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.”
He said the manufacturer added “a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback” to solve the issue.
Want to find out if the story is true? According to a vulnerability report by The Mitre Corporation, the hard drive in question was in certain laptops around 2005.
As Jackson declared in the song: “This is the test / No struggle no progress.”