Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” Music Video Crashes Old Computer Hard Drives

In his blog, The Old New Thing, Microsoft principal software engineer Raymond Chen revealed that most Windows XP-era laptops (circa 2001-2007) can’t handle playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation,” which contains a sound that can reportedly crash the hard drives on the now-antiquated devices.

“A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support,” said Chen who added that the music video also crashed laptops made by competitors. “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 judgment.”

The investigation, according to Chen, also found that playing the music video on one laptop could cause another laptop within close proximity to also crash, even if that device was not playing the video.

“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,” said Chen.

The phenomena may be the result of resonance when the sound produced by one object vibrates at the same frequency as the sound waves from another object.

“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,” added Chen. “I’m sure they put a digital version of a ‘do not remove’ sticker on that audio filter. Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.”

The video has been deemed a security vulnerability and assigned the identifier CVE-2022-38392 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research and Engineering (MITRE).

(Photo by: Christopher Polk/NBC)