50 Cent’s Saturday concert looked like a détente between schools and generations of hip-hop. The This Is 50 Festival, on Governors Island’s Water Taxi Beach, began with insightful, still-sweet rappers Kid Cudi and Wale. 50 Cent, one of the last of the big-time gangsta rappers, who had multimillion-selling albums in 2003 and 2005 before gangsta lost momentum, also performed.

But that was a fake-out. After amiably received sets by the newcomers, 50 Cent took over with a two-and-a-half-hour gangsta extravaganza. The set was crammed with guest slots — friends, allies, disciples — and insisted gangsta was still alive, rough and ready to compete.

The songs were about danger and outlaw excess — guns, drugs and sex — with crude, shout-along hooks. The neat backup tracks of the openers gave way to thudding, cranked-up bass lines and distortion, punctuated by the sounds of gunshots and breaking glass from the D.J., Whoo Kid. As at old-school New York rap shows, the stage was filled with onlookers; rappers demanded, “Put your hands up!” — as a dance move, not a holdup. And the sold-out crowd exploded. This was the bad-guy party they came for.

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With his baby face, his boyish grin, his genuine gunshot wounds and the singsong choruses of his hits, Curtis Jackson, a k a 50 Cent, established himself as a gangsta rapper who could also be a charmer: gruff and belligerent, but also amused. His next album, “Before I Self Destruct,” has been delayed repeatedly, and his recent mixtape, “Forever King,” presents a paranoid, embittered character, but he was smiling broadly onstage. He was as much host as star: performing a song or two, mostly from his first albums, and then announcing a surprise and bringing on another guest.

They included not only his own G Unit (with Tony Yayo and Lloyd Banks), but also D-Block (formerly the Lox), Wyclef Jean, Maino and Red Cafe. Between songs about lust and crime were celebrations of upward mobility despite the odds, like “We Gonna Make It” by Jadakiss of D-Block and Maino’s triumphant “All the Above.” But less righteous boasts, like 50 Cent’s “What Up Gangsta” and “P.I.M.P.,” drew even stronger reactions.

There were more guests before 50 Cent made his entrance: Jim Jones and Juelz Santana, along with Al Be Back, Uncle Murda, Cory Gunz, Papoose and the four-rapper group Slaughterhouse. Mr. Gunz showed off a virtuosic delivery, accelerating and decelerating. Papoose started rapping his way through the alphabet, with long strings of words all starting with the same letter; he got to G before his time ran out.

The openers made every effort. Kid Cudi, although he appears on the new album by Jay-Z, is an oddball in hip-hop. He’s somewhere between rapper and singer, intoning his rhymes on a few notes, and instead of boasting, he presents himself as an introvert, confessing to his vulnerabilities and uncertainties, imagining himself as a visitor from another planet. It’s a persona better suited to headphones than to an outdoor concert. Wale, a Washington, D.C., rapper who thinks hard about the state of hip-hop when he’s not bragging about being “the brightest of the youth,” was more vigorous and endearing.

This concert’s right was no match for the huge number of stories of wrongs, even those years old. Only time will tell if this is the marking of a new era in rap, or a new movement towards hip-hop nostalgia.

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My Take: The first time I heard a radio station that promised to play the “best of the 80’s, 90’s, and today”, my father- who was also in the car- turned down the volume and said, ‘it’s official: you have nostalgia music’.

As bizarre as it is to think of “P.I.M.P.” as indicative of a specific time and place now gone, the good news is, we’ll probably have something to gab about as we sit in our rocking chairs on our front porch. Wait, I meant front stoop.

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