A few nights ago, I was hanging out with my 10-year-old daughter Marion and her fifth-grader friend Emma as they took turns showing each other their favorite YouTube videos on a laptop. They surfed from one video to the next as children do, giggling their way through goofy stuff like “Banana Song (I’m a Banana),” a surreal depiction of a guy singing a banana suit, which has garnered 23 million views. All of a sudden, the banana song stopped, and I heard a grinding rock and roll guitar riff.
“Slash!” my daughter and Emma shouted.
Slash?
I took a close look at the video screen. Yup — that Slash, or at least an animated version of him, was blasting his way through the song “Kick It Up a Notch” onstage with the animated Disney characters Phineas and Ferb. Meantime, Marion and Emma played air guitar and gushed about his famous opening riff on “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” a song they’d discovered after the fun-loving Phineas and Ferb introduced them to the guitar god in the top hat.