In the Suicidal Tendencies song "Waking the Dead" what is the key to "their gate"?

The story behind the answer

In Suicidal Tendencies’ song “Waking the Dead,” the key to “their gate” is the spade.

The song uses graveyard and resurrection imagery to create a deliberately macabre, aggressive scene. The dead are buried beneath soil and rock, and the narrator imagines a spade—the tool used for digging—as the means of opening their tombs. In that context, “gate” is figurative: it refers to the barrier separating the living world from the graves of the dead.

“Waking the Dead” appears on Controlled by Hatred/Feel Like Shit… Déjà Vu, Suicidal Tendencies’ fourth studio album, released in 1989. The track was one of the songs the band introduced during its 1989 European tour and remained part of its live repertoire into the early 1990s.

Listeners may remember “the spade” as an ordinary gardening or digging tool rather than a literal key. The quiz’s capitalization, “The Spade,” does not change the answer. The canonical object named in the lyric is simply a spade.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Aug. 2026

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