As a flannel-wearing matcha drinking no good Yankee liberal I know my way around indie music. The technical term for indie is independent, music artists that don't have a label. But for the purpose of this article, I'm considering indie anything in the kind of rock-ish modern alternative type category. (Not 2008 alternative with Creed and Nickleback, they're banned.)

It can be psychedelic or semi-psychedelic like MGMT and Tame Impala, or more "alternative" British type bands like the Neighbourhood or the Arctic Monkeys. It's all pretty subjective, more of a "you know it when you hear it" type thing, but that's not the point.

The point here is, unfortunately, this type of music is playing a big role in making cigarettes cool again.

Let's head way back to middle school in the year 2009 when every pre-emo girl in the country in pink converse was in love with NeverShoutNever, the training bra of indie music. It essentially consists of Christopher Drew, lead vocalist, and ukulele player, and a couple of random band members that rotate in and out and no one really knows about them.

Christopher Drew in 2010 released two separate songs that included mentions of cigarettes. One of them, Coffee and Cigarettes, an upbeat, happy, song, paints smoking in a good light. We can see this reflected in fan art on Tumblr and deviant art.

This was a huge problem at the time since many of Never Shout Never's fans were highly impressionable pre-teen girls, myself being one of them.

And the people that spent their middle school years listening to NeverShoutNever are now listening to people like Mac Demarco, who essentially uses cigarettes to brand himself. It's like his thing.

One of his songs, Ode to Viceroy, is literally about a cigarette brand. The music video even shows one of those graphic anti-smoking PSAs with the lady with a stoma, and them Mac DeMarco just smoking and singing again, almost as if to mock the PSA.

Away from the "single dude with an instrument" style of indie music, we have British bands like the Neighbourhood and the Arctic Monkeys who just love to use cigarettes as a prop to demonstrate "badassery" and freedom.

In the sweater weather music video, we see the band members smoking cigarettes in a convertible in leather jackets like they're on their way to a "Grease" convention.

But it's not jus the guys that do it, Lana Del Rey is known to smoke on stage. In the "national anthem" music video the lyrics "he said to be cool but I'm already coolest" play over video of Lana Smoking a cigarette. A not so subtle signal that "smoking is cool."

Lana also routinely smokes onstage, often dressed in 1950's/60's garb, which I think, is a way of making her smoking seem much more acceptable, because it was not uncommon at all to see 1950's/60's celebrities smoking, so someone wearing a 60's shift dress with a bouffant and a cigarette seems much more acceptable than someone in modern clothing smoking.

There are far to many artists that have played a part in making smoking "cool" to go deeply into.

I'm not calling for a ban on indie music or anything, I'm sure not gonna stop listening to it anytime soon. But just be aware of the media you're consuming, know that cigarettes are still just as deadly as they've always been, and you don't need to smoke them to fit in. More importantly, tell your younger siblings that just because their favorite artists do it doesn't mean its okay for them to too.