This photo clearly belongs to another time. A time when smoking cigarettes was considered incredibly fascinating, and it was one of Hollywood actors’ most effective seduction techniques. Laureen Bacall, pictured above, and her screen and life partner Humphrey Bogart, have turned more people to cigarettes than the Marlboro Man. Today we know that smoking is bad, both for smokers and for those that surround them. Moreover, we’ve been (mostly) convinced that it’s not a cool thing to do: no one smokes on screen anymore (except in period dramas like Mad Men, and not without controversy), the world wants to be fit, have great skin tone, smell like roses… So today’s issue of MOSS, songs about cigarettes (featuring Patsy Cline, Otis Redding, Brownsville Station and Tex Williams, plus a few runner-ups including k.d. lang), is really a look into relics of a bygone past. A time when you could seduce an entire generation just by lighting up, like Laureen Bacall.
