With the help of new and new-ish venues, downtown San Jose saw some great shows in 2015. Sir Mix-A-Lot proved that big butts will never go out of style, and Mac Sabbath demonstrated the power of drive-thru metal with energetic sets at The Ritz; Kirk Hammett brought djent masters Meshuggah and stoner metal veterans High On Fire to the RockBar Theater, with his two-day Fear FestEvil; The Velvet Teen returned with a full-length album and a powerhouse performance at Cafe Stritch; and The Continental Bar, Lounge and Patio hosted some fantastic, forward-thinking dance music—hosting, among others, Ali Shaheed Muhammad of A Tribe Called Quest fame.

Some notable big-name acts rolled through town, as well. Taylor Swift brought her 1989 World Tour to Levi’s Stadium, while Aziz Ansari got big laughs and The Weeknd hit high notes at the Shark Tank.

Also, this year in the realm of musical WTFs, Chris Brown presided over a terrible party (see Pg. 14) at the Fiesta nightclub in south San Jose, where five fans were shot; and Steve Harwell—frontman for the reviled San Jose-bred alt-rockers, Smash Mouth—had a meltdown after the crowd at a Colorado music festival started throwing slices of bread at the band during their set.

“I’m gonna come find your ass, I’m gonna beat your ass, whoever the fuck you are out there, OK?” Harwell can be heard saying into the microphone in a viral video of the bizarre spectacle. A Vine clip of Brown’s “Capricorn Bash” shows the self-styled bad boy R&B singer flinching as shots ring out in the middle of his song, “Loyal.”

And 2015 was also a great year for local releases. Here are my five favorites:

Will Sprott—Vortex Numbers
Former frontman for The Mumlers—one of the better indie rock outfits to emerge from the South Bay in recent memory—released his debut solo LP. On Vortex Numbers, Sprott, who now lives in Seattle, lays out a stripped-down, 10-song set, which recalls his work with the Mumlers, as well as the dusty, shuffling beats, warm guitar lines and shaky harmonies of The Rolling Stones.

Rey Resurreccion­—Heart of the City
When he isn’t rocking shows, writing raps or working on beats in his downtown studio, Rey Resurreccion can often be found teaching chess to young kids. One day in late 2014, Resurreccion told a group of his mentees to “make sure every move you make counts.” Rey Res knows a thing or two about waiting for the right moment. The local emcee made sure that everything was just so before dropping his third full-length, Heart of the City, on Jan. 27. The album is his strongest to date.

Forgotten Gods—Twin Sisters
Anyone who has recorded a full-length record on a tight budget and in a professional studio knows just how stressful the process can be. That they managed to record their sophomore LP in just two days is, in itself, a testament to the work ethic of local stoner metalheads Forgotten Gods—especially considering how good it is. There wasn’t much room for error, says guitarist Dave Stoltenberg. But that didn’t get him too worked up. “We figured that Black Sabbath did Paranoid in one day. We had twice that amount of time.”

Citabria—Exit Reality
After local alt-rockers Citabria released the excellent, if scrappy, The Stereo Guillotine EP in 2010, local fans couldn’t get enough. But then internal tensions led the band to take a long hiatus. They returned in 2015 with the highly polished and ultra-catch Exit Reality. One of the album’s standout tracks, “The Animal,” features a stuttering, Moog bass line, soaring vocal harmonies and jet-plane guitars; it sounds like a cross between Muse, Depeche Mode and Dredg.

Eric Victorino—“Captured”
The frontman for Strata and The Limousines decided to step out on his own this year. Initially calling the project Gestalt—a nod to the psychological concept that underpins the project—he has since changed his moniker to E. James. A record is due out in mid-2016, according to his PledgeMusic page, but at least one full track has been released: the moody, downtempo, electronic track, “Captured.” A snippet of another song, “Stumble Back To You,” recalls the exuberance of Passion Pit.

Anyone whose knowledge of Detroit hip-hop begins and ends with Eminem would do well to study up on Slum Village. The story of this crew is one of the strangest in modern hip-hop, a sprawling saga that begins in the same world of Motor City battle rap that 8 Mile made famous, and winds up in a bizarre implosion of schizophrenia, mysterious death and one man left to carry on the legacy.

Spoiler alert: that last rapper standing is Elzhi, who performs at Pagoda Lounge in San Jose this week. He had maybe the hardest job ever in Slum Village—replacing J Dilla, arguably the greatest beatmaker of his generation. Some might have thought he was set up to fail, but what Elzhi did with that double-edged opportunity took the group to whole new level.

Born Jason Powers, Elzhi was only 12 when Slum Village was formed in 1991, but as a teenager he saw the trio of rappers behind the group—Dilla, Baatin and T3—battling at open mics like the one hosted by Proof at the Hip Hop Shop on Seven Mile Road (dramatized in 8 Mile and immortalized on Proof’s debut album, I Miss the Hip Hop Shop).

Over the course 1996 and 1997, Slum Village recorded Fantastic, Vol. 1, which was as underground as underground gets. Officially, it never even saw the light of day for eight more years, but with bootlegs everywhere, the Detroit scene went crazy for it. This was almost entirely due to the production from Dilla, who recorded the album in his home studio. It also put the group in the odd position of releasing volume two of Fantastic before they had officially released volume one.

To make things even weirder, they used an alias (J-88) to release Best Kept Secret. Both Fantastic Vol. 2 and Best Kept Secret featured re-workings of songs from their unreleased debut.

Maybe they would have stayed Detroit’s best kept secret if it wasn’t for Dilla’s breakout success as a producer. He was on A Tribe Called Quest’s production team and the group opened on Tribe’s farewell tour, linking them in fans’ minds with the De La Soul/Tribe alt-hop movement.

This was a fair enough assessment sonically, as they had a similarly soulful sound with completely unique beats. But as MCs, they couldn’t touch the depth of Tribe or De La—they just didn’t seem to have much to say.

That’s where Elzhi came in. In 2002, Dilla was focused on his solo career, and Elzhi was brought in to more or less take his place. His lines and rhymes were more complex and interesting, a better match for the always-impeccable production. This single “Tainted” became an underground hit.

“From sunset Friday to sunset Saturday, your mind had to be on nobody but God,” says Phife Dawg, remembering weekends at his grandmother’s house growing up, in last year’s documentary about A Tribe Called Quest, Beats, Rhymes and Life. “So I had to sneak and watch Soul Train. I had to sneak and watch Scooby Doo, or whatever cartoon was popping off at the time. But when it came to the block parties and the hip hop, once I saw them grabbing mics and getting busy, I risked my livelihood, getting kicked out of the house and everything, just to be a part of it.”

So how did this hip-hop legend, who lived for his music, go on to be the same one who later said, “I love hip-hop, but at the rate its going right now, I could do with or without it?”

That’s the strange story of Phife Dawg, who performs at Axis Nightclub in Santa Clara this Friday. Growing up in Queens as Malik Taylor, he was not just one of the founding members of Tribe, but the common demominator of the group, the one who basically brought them all together. His childhood best friend and fellow MC Q-Tip jumped out front to become the recognizable voice of Tribe on their first album, but on their second, 1991’s The Low End Theory, Phife started to emerge as an MC, especially on “Check the Rhime,” one of their most famous songs. By their next, 1993’s Midnight Marauders, the interplay between Q-Tip and Phife was an integral part of their sound.

After the group broke up, Phife put out one solo album in 2000, but the follow-up has been delayed by over a decade as he dealt with crippling health problems culminating in a kidney transplant in 2008. While Michael Rapaport’s 2011 documentary is far from the definitive statement about Tribe, it seems to have at least re-ignited Phife’s career—he was the only member of the group to stand behind it and even tour around it.

Phife’s show is one of the first from Alan Lim and Johnny Caron, who as Avant Productions have started booking shows at Axis Nightclub in conjunction with longtime DJ Dave Dynamix. So far, they’ve been on a roll, bringing the kind of bigger hip-hop shows that the South Bay has never really had a spot for. Last weekend, Axis had a “Legends” show featuring pioneering Bay Area turntablists Q-Bert, D-Styles and Shortkut of Invisibl Skratch Piklz.