Janet Jackson’s 1989 music video for the ‘Rhythm Nation’ single drove the album to become one of the most commercially successful of its time, resulting in seven singles reaching the Billboard Top 100 chart, a groundbreaking record for the singer.
But it wasn’t just records that the ‘Rhythm Nation’ video broke. According to Microsoft’s chief software engineer, Jackson’s music inadvertently had the power to break laptops too.
As detailed by Microsoft’s Reymond Chen in a blog post, he first became aware of the bizarre breakages when a colleague of his flagged it to Windows XP support. “A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’ would crash certain models of laptops,” he wrote.
“I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem,” he joked. “Not an artistic judgment”. During the investigation, the team found that playing the music video did indeed crash some of their competitor’s laptops.
Stranger still, Chen wrote that they also found something “something extremely weird”, namely that playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, “even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video”.
The engineer explained that the song contained one of the “natural resonant frequencies” for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that other computer manufacturers used. They worked around the ‘Rhythm Nation’ issue by adding a special filter in the audio pipeline, which could detect the frequency and remove it while the video played.
In a later music video, Jackson seems to predict the technical mayhem she would cause. In 1993’s ‘Scream’ video, she collaborated with her brother, Michael Jackson, and the two of them are seen in a futuristic spaceship, continually smashing screens with the sheer power of their voices.
It was a revolutionary video, not least because it broke a Guinness World Record for the most expensive music video ever made at $7million, but was nominated for 11 MTV Video Music Awards, more than any other music video had done before. It walked away with three wins, ‘Best Dance Video’, ‘Best Art Direction’, and ‘Best Choreography’.
In her A&E and Lifetime docuseries Janet Jackson, the singer revealed her brother’s record company kept them apart while they filmed the video, something she said was “tough” as a performer but also for their sibling relationship. “Michael shot nights. I shot days,” she explained. “His record company would block off his set so that I couldn’t see what was going on. They didn’t want me on set,” she said. “I felt like they were trying to make it very competitive between the two of us.”
