Released in 1976, The Royal Scam is Steely Dan at their most unapologetically jaded. It's a jazz-rock hybrid with teeth—a cynical, slick sonic masterpiece drenched in New York cool and post-Watergate paranoia. While previous albums like Can't Buy a Thrill, Pretzel Logic, and Katy Lied already established Donald Fagen and Walter Becker as masters of genre-defying songwriting, The Royal Scam took things to a sharper, more rebellious nature. Such musically complex chordal arrangements and lyrical themes weren’t really part of the Pop/Rock/Jazz landscape at the time. Then again, they may have been all of those things, and yet none of them at all.