Janet Jackson’s single “Rhythm Nation” was a powerful song when it dropped back in 1989
With unforgettable choreography and a short film to accompany it, the song spoke about racial unity and social consciousness.
Turns out the song was actually harmful so some laptops.
Writing in a blog post on August 16, Microsoft software developer Raymond Chen said a colleague from Windows XP support told him that a major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops.
He said the 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 worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.
