According to billboard.com, Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ is causing old laptops to crash, says Microsoft’s chief software engineer, Raymond Chen. Apparently, it all has to do with the specific frequency featured in “Rhythm Nation” that interferes only with laptop hard drives that spin at 5400 rpm. Janet Jackson’s song was released in 1989 off of her album Rhythm Nation 1814. The album produced seven top five singles on the Billboard Hot 100, a record still held by the pop icon. According to Raymond Chen, manufacturers who produced this 5400 rpm drive fixed the problem by adding a custom filter in audio in order to remove the frequencies from songs like these that caused problems with older hard drives. Chen is quoted in saying that, “in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why [the filter is] 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.”
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