Janet Jackson single Rhythm Nation can crash old laptops

Virgin Radio

23 Aug 2022, 14:02

As anyone who owns a laptop will know, there are many things that can cause it to crash, such as errors in the operating system, hardware issues, and overheating. However, it turns out that Janet Jackson’s single Rhythm Nation can also crash laptops.

Yes, you read that right - Janet Jackson’s single Rhythm Nation can crash laptops. 

So, if you can’t work out why your old laptop keeps conking out, have you considered that it might be due to a pop/dance cracker from 1989?

Even weirder (yes, this story does get weirder) is that the song can reportedly even crash laptops that are merely in the vicinity of a laptop that is playing the song!

We know what you’re thinking. What the heck? How on earth can a particular song crash a laptop, even when it’s not playing on that laptop?

Well, in a recent blog post, Microsoft’s principal software engineer, Raymond Chen, explained: “The song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that [an unspecified manufacturer] and other manufacturers used.”

As reported by Hot New Hip Hop, the software engineer wrote that the frequency causes some old laptops from around 2005 to crash when playing the audio. Think of a computery version of how glass can shatter when exposed to certain pitches, and you’ve got the right kind of idea.

This means that even playing the song on one laptop could cause another nearby to crash. Bonkers, right?

Chen 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.” 

He added: “Hopefully now their laptops no longer contain this audio filter, which is necessary to protect against damage to a hard drive that they no longer use.”

The single was taken from the album Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, and it has also been included in two of the artist's greatest hits collections, Design of a Decade: 1986–1996 (1995) and Number Ones (2009).