In contrast to their music-making methods -- which usually involved holing up for weeks in a Los Angeles studio with the hottest session players around -- Walter Becker and Donald Fagen's best lyrics for Steely Dan songs focused on the embittered lives of savvy streetwise survivors of urban America. THE ROYAL SCAM, their response to bicentennial mania, offered the angriest and most edgy of these tales: The narrator of "Don't Take Me Alive" is a career criminal on the lam, "The Fez" is the story of a sex fetishist, and the title track takes a sardonic look at the American dream (a stance accented by the cover, which depicts a homeless person at a monument). The music is equally edgy -- with its bleak outlook, grisly tone, and blistering guitar leads, this is an album that disappears down a dark alley and doesn't come back.
