Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ Is So Powerful It’s Been Crashing Laptops

Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ Is So Powerful It’s Been Crashing Laptops

For some of us, Janet Jackson and her catalog of songs have done things to our hearts and minds for many years. Apparently, the Rhythm in her Nation does things to some laptop computers!

Raymond Chen is a Microsoft employee who has been with the company for more than 25 years. In a recent blog he pens for Microsoft, he writes that a major computer manufacturer recently found out that playing one particular Jackson song causes certain laptops to crash!

Apparently, while playing the popular title song of her 1989 album, Rhythm Nation, certain models of laptops would crash. But, not only did the musical track crash the laptop, the music video crashed some of their competitors’ portable computers. Yet, another issue took place. When the music video would play on one laptop it would also cause another laptop in the area to also crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t even playing the video!

It is often said that music is powerful, but no one anticipated a Jackson song to reach inside a computer and cause it to come crashing down.

Chen wrote, “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.

“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.”

Luckily, the popularity of the woman who played Penny on the television sitcom, Good Times didn’t short circuit or crash the record crowd that attended her performance in New Orleans at this year’s Essence Fest last month.

According to local news outlet NOLA, the festival’s most popular night brought the dance music icon on stage, resulting in one of the “highest grosses in Essence Fest’s entire 27-year history.”

In late 2021, Hulu and the New York Times launched a documentary titled Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, and in early 2022, A&E and Lifetime launched a four-hour self-titled docuseries.

While making history, the 56-year-old songstress is gearing up to release her 11th studio album, “Black Diamond,” which is set for sometime this year.

Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ Is So Powerful It’s Been Crashing Laptops