“Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out” was Mayer Hawthorne’s first foray into modern soul music. The red, heart-shaped 45 released on Stones Throw in 2008 caught fire in year of forgettable singles, propelling Mayer Hawthorne’s career into the stratosphere. Four years later, he’s revisiting his roots on October 26 at the Pagoda Lounge.

With its doo-wop touches, minimal sound, and undeniable catchiness, fans of hip-hop and soul were instantly gripped. The record soon became a hard-to-get collectors’ item and Mayer took off on world tours shortly after. With his thick-rimmed glasses, vintage suits, and bowties, the rapper-turned-DJ-turned-singer has pushed his success further than ever imaged.

Mayer’s now a regular on the late-night TV circuit and plays huge international music festivals; he’s even collaborated on tracks with Snoop Dogg of all people. Not too bad for an indie-rapper who almost retired when “underground rap” began losing steam in the early 2000s. He’s since worked with modern dance troupes like SebastiAn while many of his songs have been used on major TV shows like Ugly Betty. And while he cites Curtis Mayfield and the late J Dilla as influences, he’s also performed with more modern, commercial acts like Foster The People and Bruno Mars. His latest release, How Do You Do, showed more of a focus on funk and modern R&B than the Motown vibes that marked his first album. Mayer’s undeniably strong songwriting keeps him busy regardless of genre.

In between official albums, Internet-only releases, and wild collaborations, Hawthorne sticks to his guns too, making one-off DJ appearances to the surprise of many fans. His DJ chops aren’t bad either, as he’s played alongside turntable maestros like Jrocc of the Beat Junkies.

Though his career is in full stride, he seems to always return to his roots. Everything will come full circle when Hawthorne returns to San Jose for a rare, live DJ set. After all, he has San Jose’s own Peanut Butter Wolf to thank for putting him on Stones Throw to begin with. His stop in San Jose also marks the two-year anniversary of the “Live at the Pagoda” series at the Fairmont Hotel, which has brought acclaimed acts like Adrian Younge and Toro Y Moi to the San Jose.

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.

SoCal producer prodigy Dibiase remembers when L.A. became a beat mecca in 2005. Flipping his own first beats as a teenager growing up in Watts, he wasn’t too long out of high school when he started getting invited to events like Sketchbook, the weekly Tuesday night gathering of up-and-coming talent at the Little Temple club in Silver Lake. At this point, no one knew how huge the scene was going to get, and the early efforts of the West Coast’s best new beatmakers were blasting out every week through the speakers of Dibiase’s boombox.

“I would bring it to Sketchbook every week, and everybody would bring their beat tapes or CDs,” he remembers. “I’d pass the boombox around outside like a round table, and everybody’d play what they made that week. Some people might have made 12 beats, some people might have made 5. But the people who were playing their beats were like Fly Lo, Ras G, a lot of the cats killing it. Georgia Ann Muldrow, she would play stuff there. Sacred, Taarach, pretty much everybody that was in the scene.”

Now, as Dibiase (pronounced Dee-bee-ah-see) makes only his second visit ever to San Jose this week to guest at 2012’s first Treatment night at Johnny V’s, he’s still processing how much things have changed since then. After winning more than 20 beat battles around Los Angeles, he made his name once and for all winning the Red Bull Big Tune Battle in 2010. That same year, he released his first album with one of the hottest labels around for indie hip-hop and electro, Alpha Pup Records. Machines Hate Me, while not his most mind-bending record, was a good introduction to Dibiase’s obsessions for the world at large. Dense, ingeniously sample-heavy and influenced by everything from J Dilla’s MPC work to chiptune video-game music, it’s a natural progression for a producer who started out in junior high chopping up records with nothing but an 8-second sampler and a drum machine to make his beats.

“Stuff that I did in the beginning, a lot of that was trial and error,” he says. “That ended up becoming a sound that people like now. I used to distort a lot of sounds, do a lot of low-fi sounding stuff by default. People were like ‘Man, you need to clean that up.’ Now that sound is popular, that low-fi sound. Now they make equipment and software to do the stuff I was doing by default.”

As time went on, he started trolling pawn shops for whatever equipment he could afford. An MPC cost $2000, and he never thought he’d be able to buy one. But after he got a job, his family secured the credit and he made the payments. Still, his unpredictable style didn’t change.

“The eight second samplers, there were a lot of limits. It forced you to be creative. So once I got on the MPC, I felt like I advanced a lot, but I still tried to have the approach like I was limited. Cause once you feel like you can do anything, you’re too comfortable, you get lazy with stuff.”

Now his deft touch with technology is one of his signatures. “I like to mess with a lot of different equipment, software and hardware. Every piece of equipment, I try to have a different sound on it. Still keep my signature sound, but try to create a different identity with each. You learn new tricks, and that helps you evolve,” he says.

A classic example of his style is his beat for U-N-I’s single “Beautiful Day.” But the story behind it is even more revealing of Dibiase’s obsessive, never-throw-away-anything process. It turns out the beat to the song was just one of dozens he had once been selling online for $50 each. He met U-N-I when filling in as a DJ at a friend’s show, and when they expressed interest in his work, he remembered that one beat sitting unused in a gigantic file somewhere.

“They came through to the crib like two days later, and I played ‘em that ‘Beautiful Day’ beat from that $50 batch,” he says. “And the rest is history. I remember Y-O came up with the hook right on the spot as he was listening to it. Now it’s got like a million views. Somebody could have had that for 50 dollars.”

Dibiase will guest this Thursday, Feb. 2, at Treatment, the DJ night at Johnny V’s that features resident turntablists Squareweezy, Dandiggety, Joob, Wish1, Professor Panson, B.Lewis, Insightful, Shea Butter and R-Cade. 10pm; free.