Just before sunset on a luminous August evening, a few boats pulled up outside a waterfront stage at SeaWorld San Diego, the controversial theme park known for its dolphin and orca shows. Two people on a jetski idled next to the boats. They were waiting for the music to begin.
Everyone was here to see Ginuwine, the R&B singer famous for Pony (1996) and In Those Jeans (2003). But why was the 54-year-old master of the late-90s sex ballad headlining a show at an aquatic theme park for children?
Clips from previous SeaWorld concerts had been going viral on social media all summer, fueled by the internet’s deep confusion. A parade of late 90s and early 2000s hip-hop and R&B stars, including Soulja Boy and Bow Wow, the Ying Yang Twins and Trina, had taken SeaWorld’s island stage in the past two months. Rolling Stone dubbed it “one of the summer’s most viral concert series”, right after Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar.
“Why is SeaWorld rebranded as BET Spring Bling?” one widely shared post asked. “I love it because it makes no sense whatsoever,” another user admitted. A Reddit user rewrote the lyrics to Pony with a SeaWorld focus: “If you’re Shamu, let’s do it, ride it, my orca.”
Some audience members at the Ginuwine concert on Saturday night were cynical about the show’s appeal, noting that the unexpected venue was giving artists long past their prime renewed attention, or wondering whether the concerts had been engineered to bring more Black families to SeaWorld. (A park spokesperson says they were not.) The animal rights group Peta has called it an attempt to rebrand the park’s image, tarnished by the 2013 documentary BlackFish, which raised questions about its treatment of orcas. “We hope artists will steer clear of these desperate abusement parks,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Clips on social media showed crowds of fans dancing and cheering, but I wondered if, in person, a SeaWorld performance might feel more like a farce, or even a tragedy. What I did not expect was that Ginuwine’s SeaWorld concert would turn out to be a masterclass in ageing gracefully – no matter your surroundings.
Ginuwine at SeaWorld … pic.twitter.com/k70Ul1Az5N
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) August 22, 2025
My SeaWorld first
My trip to see Ginuwine was my first experience of the six-decade-old southern California aquatic theme park, which offers a bewildering mishmash of attractions: sea-themed amusement park rides, carnival games, encounters with live animals and full-on sea mammal and killer whale shows, all of them mobbed with exhausted parents and crowds of enthusiastic children. The number of signs advertising additional animal contact for a fee made the park feel a little bit like a red-light district of the sea. Did I want to non-consensually touch a shark? I did not.
SeaWorld, which is part of a publicly traded amusement park company, argues that it has changed substantially since its founding in 1962, and that its animal shows are now focused on education, conservation and science, not mere entertainment. The company’s response to those who say the conditions of the park are cruel is to ask people to visit the park and see for themselves.
Jackie Plaza, the vice-president of marketing and sales at SeaWorld San Diego, said that the viral hip-hop concerts do not actually feature any live animals – say, dolphins leaping into the air during the climax of a song – because of the park’s core values.
“Everything we do with animals has an educational component behind it. Having dolphins jump during concerts doesn’t meet one of our pillars,” Plaza said.
The park does invite its headlining artists to experience the park with their family and friends before the show. “Trina met our dolphins, with her backup dancers,” Plaza said. Bow Wow and Soulja Boy went to the orca experience. The park’s president, Tyler Carter, took Baby Bash’s kids on the penguin encounter.
I had assumed that my Saturday evening at SeaWorld would be completely focused on the Ginuwine concert, but that was far from true. The throwback musical performance was happening at just one of the park’s amphitheaters. At other aquatic stages, the typical programming went on: dolphins and whales were swimming in circles, pounding the water with their tails and splashing the shrieking customers in the “soak zone”.
When I asked a park employee at the dolphin stadium where to find Ginuwine’s concert, I was told: “On the other side, by the orcas.” What did it feel like, I wondered, to be an ageing veteran of the music industry, and to be competing for billing with Shamu?
There was no musical opening act for Ginuwine’s 6pm concert, making the de facto opener a 5pm performance on the other side of the park by Melanie, a 650lb dolphin who did tricks for fish. As I watched the 35-year-old dolphin obediently splash a small grinning child, I found myself getting anxious. Melanie was good. All the dolphins were good. As music thrummed through the amphitheater, a trio of dolphins, lithe and dazzling, leapt into the air, and then leapt again. The audience oohed. How could even the most formidable ageing human artist compete?
Pony fans
I shouldn’t have worried. Ginuwine, the stage name for Elgin Baylor Lumpkin, has been wooing audiences for three decades. Even SeaWorld could not slime his suave.
These days, you might be most likely to hear Ginuwine’s music at a karaoke bar: the explicit Pony (“If you’re horny, let’s do it, ride it, my pony”) is a perennial favorite. Like sex itself, Ginuwine’s songs are ridiculous in every way and yet still mesmerizing. “Looking tasty, really scrumptious,” he sings. “Tell me: is there any more room for me in those jeans?” As I wandered towards the concert venue, almost every park sign I saw began to sound like a suggestive Ginuwine title. Animal Interactions? The Jellyfish Experience?
Despite Ginuwine’s greatest hits being more than two decades old (one of his sexy songs is about a two-way pager), much of the audience waiting for him at SeaWorld was enthusiastic.
Gloria Means, 73, a travel nurse from Nevada, had come to SeaWorld for the day with her cousin, Lorna Harbin, 63. They were so excited to see that Ginuwine was performing that they paid an extra $50 each for reserved seats with a better view. Means was pleased to learn that the R&B star’s appeal was spreading to new generations: when she texted her daughter-in-law and granddaughter about the concert, her granddaughter demanded: “What do you know about Ginuwine?”
“They don’t ever think that granny had a life before she was granny,” Means said.
Shortly after 6pm, Ginuwine, dressed all in white, appeared on the causeway that led to a small island stage. He waved first at the boats, then turned to his fans on shore and grinned. He still had a megawatt smile.
The performance that followed was simple yet impressive: just Ginuwine and two gray-bearded backup singers who had been working with him for decades. No dancers, no special effects. Ginuwine did not sing Pony while riding on a real dolphin, or even a model of Shamu. (Don’t pay Beyoncé prices, don’t expect Beyoncé effects.) Though he threatened to jump in the water and swim to his fans, he did not.
But he was still handsome, he still could sing and for this 3,400-person audience in a bizarre venue, the R&B legend absolutely did not phone it in.
Concertgoers swayed along to their old favorites, waved their hands and took photos of themselves dancing by the water. The audience included millennial friends and couples celebrating birthdays, mom friend groups with crowds of kids and at least one local influencer. In the front row, Troyae Grant was livestreaming the concert directly to her mother via FaceTime. Ginuwine repeatedly told his fans how grateful he was for them and their support.
While one San Diego couple told me that some very adult SeaWorld performances in previous years had prompted parents to flee the arena with their kids – particularly, they said, when Ashanti performed in 2023 – Ginuwine’s show was restrained in its sexiness. He avoided any SeaWorld puns. He did not say: “Your panties are the soak zone.”
The only time he expressed any bitterness over his current status in the industry was when he thanked SeaWorld for giving him a full hour to perform, and said how frustrating it was to be only given a few minutes onstage at recent concerts. “I got 30 years in the business and 10 albums. Why are you going to give me 15 to 20 minutes?” he asked. There were sounds of outrage from the women around me.
It was refreshing, in these times, to witness a public figure act with dignity – to see Ginuwine, through his own sense of self-respect, turn what could have been a farcical performance into one that was graceful, even moving. Decades after his chart-topping days, he still believed in the value of his artistry and the delight of his performance, and he made them real.
It was a stark contrast to the country’s youth-and-growth obsessed culture: a vision of ageing without shame, seeing an older artist’s smaller crowds, gentler moves and less-limber bodies as simply a different phase of a beautiful career, not a painful letdown from the peak of youthful fame.
It didn’t hurt that the small SeaWorld stage offered the vintage performers a stunningly gorgeous view across San Diego’s Marina Bay. The water was framed with swaying palm trees, the kind of sunlit natural beauty that much larger and more prestigious venues could not provide.
The travel nurse and her cousin, who had not expected to see a Ginuwine concert that day, both left satisfied. Ginuwine was “old school”, Means said: “He gave us a show.”
“It was da bomb,” Harbin said.
