You might not think of Nancy Pelosi, the 79-year-old Speaker of the House, as a musician, but after this amazing discovery, you will. Pelosi recently went viral in conservative circles when footage of her, supposedly inebriated but actually just slowed down to three-quarter speed, made the rounds. But here’s what we discovered when we slowed down the audio even more: She sounds just like Sigur Rós!
It’s true that slowing Nancy Pelosi’s speech down to about 75 percent of normal makes her sound a bit drunk. But color us astonished to find out that when you take audio of the lifelong political activist who has represented California in the House for more than 30 years and reduce the speed by a factor of eight, it sounds like an unreleased track from the blissed-out Icelandic band with more than half a dozen albums to their name. Take that, conservatives.
Of course, we can’t take full credit for this discovery. Back in 2010, a redditor messing around with Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” accidentally created an “ambient/drone masterpiece” when he slowed the track down using a program called Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch. Soon, slowing down tracks to ambient speed was sweeping the nation.
“You might spot hints of Sigur Rós, Brian Eno, Dead Can Dance, or Eluvium surfacing in this slowly cresting haze,” the AV Club wrote at the time. You can say the same thing, word for word, about these Pelosi tracks, which will no doubt soon be sweeping across social media in a viral frenzy.
Gizmodo wrote that the Bieber audio “sounds like the climactic score to some kind of historical epic, or Dead Can Dance, or, like, Animal Collective, or something. It sounds like the ocean, but, like, in heaven, man.” Again, this exact sentence is also how I would describe slowed-down Pelosi.
Just incredible. We know Speaker Pelosi has a few things on her plate (to say the least!) but if her career in Washington doesn’t work out, well, she can always give Hopelandic a try, ha ha.
