WANTAGH, N.Y. — Several strains of hip-hop nostalgia coexisted neatly at the Nikon at Jones Beach Theater here on Sunday. There were love letters to the 1980s and ’90s. There was a longing for the ostensibly unfulfilled promise of socially conscious rap. And there was a geographically driven hunger too, a pining for the time when the five boroughs (and sometimes Long Island) were the epicenter of hip-hop.

But while it satisfied all these divergent impulses, Rock the Bells, which is ...(read more)