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Fat Joe. Bow Wow. Ying Yang Twins. Ginuwine. The Diamond Princess herself, Miss Trina. It sounds like the kind of line-up you might see at a gargantuan millennial-baiting nostalgia festival like Lovers & Friends. But instead, this summer, these artists and more—B-list bastions of the ‘90s/aughts golden age of hip-hop & R&B—could be found performing at the unlikeliest of venues: SeaWorld.

Yes, SeaWorld. Even with the likes of Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar and SZA, Lady Gaga and The Weeknd criscrossing the country this summer, one of the season’s most reliably viral sensations was a concert series that brought some of your favorite MTV Jams staples to the 61-year-old aquatic theme park. Joey Crack instructed families to lean back in front of orcas. The Ying Yang Twins took it from the window to the wall against the backdrop of San Diego’s Mission Bay. And Waka Flocka Flame bellowed “Hard in Da Paint” at audiences ranging from Gen Z to boomer.

That’s exactly what SeaWorld’s park president Tyler Carter and VP of Marketing Jackie Plaza say they were betting on: leaning into the gleeful dissonance, and netting a significant cultural return. Sadly I did not attend any of these shows, but after the fifth or sixth week of viral reactiom, SeaWorld’s motion was undeniable—so I reached out to SeaWorld’s brain trust to figure out how a milquetoast theme park suddenly went full 106 & Park.

“This was very intentional,” Carter tells me on a joint call with Plaza. “I will say, we were hoping to go viral—but we did not expect to go to this level so fast and so consistently.”

And despite the jokes that proliferated online about the bookings being the work of some intern gone rogue, the retro programming was actually a highly strategic move on SeaWorld’s part—a response, the execs say, to data that had been accruing in front of their eyes for years.

“We’ve been doing concerts regularly since 2019,” Carter says. “Each year it’s been about testing and trying things. And as Jackie, the entertainment team and I planned 2025, we noticed that there was this feeling of nostalgia with certain artists, like an Ashanti who we had in ’22 and ’23, [or] Bow Wow and Soulja Boy, who we had in 2023 and ’24. And we thought, How do we go all in on this?”

In previous years, the park has made room across the nine-week schedule for acts representing a wide array of genres, from hip-hop to country to Christian rock. But in gauging which shows had the most impact, Carter and Plaza realized focusing on aughts hip-hop and R&B allowed them to take a something-for-everyone approach on a different, smarter level, casting a wide net generationally instead of genre-wise. “Some of those songs are sampled, so a lot of those beats go back,” Plaza points out. “When you look at hip-hop and R&B, it’s drawing back on Motown, it’s drawing back on disco, it’s drawing into this music that always goes across generations.”