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Unlike “Cesaro Summability”, you don’t need a math degree to get what Keenan is talking about on “Ænima”. Like the best tracks on Ænima, the song highlights all of the band’s strengths in the most straightforward of ways. Adam Jones’ sterile, stabbing guitar playing is offset by Danny Carey’s seismic drumming. The opening riff is one of the most recognized riffs in Tool’s catalog. But instead of Bickle’s wish for a cleansing “rain” to wipe the vermin from the streets of New York City, Keenan is singing about “The Big One” sending self-help obsessed neurotics, wannabe gangsters, and cellphone-toting Hollywood execs into the sea. The song is drawn partly from a Bill Hicks routine and seemingly from one of Travis Bickle’s rants from the film Taxi Driver. Maynard James Keenan spent months constructing the lyrics, and for what it’s worth, the track netted Tool a Grammy. “Ænima”, like “Forty Six & Two”, is Tool bringing all of the themes of its second LP into one song. Even if that means referring to it as “the baby song”. Say what you want about “Cesaro Summability”, if you’re a fan of the band, you can recognize the song. It also implies the album would not lose any of its impact (and in some cases, may actually be stronger) if it was left on the cutting room floor. To be a filler track, it needs to be almost indistinguishable from other tracks on an album. And while “Cesaro Summability” has been described as a “filler” track by some fans, I can’t wholly agree. Running at under two minutes, “Cesaro Summability” can be at least applauded for being wildly experimental, but knowing when to make its exit. But for the Tool fans who are bent on dissecting all of Ænima‘s meanings, this site is the closest I can come to describing the term. For someone with a journalism major and an English minor, this song seems to naturally repel me. The song’s title derives from a mathematical method of assigning a sum value to an infinite series. Then, for the span of one minute, a loop of white noise plays. Tool’s “Cesaro Summability” opens with the sound of a newborn crying.