An interactive autobiography with a soundtrack

IT'S ALL A DREAMTHE STORY OF MYCUL

DYCKMAN

I was born in New York City, one of three boys.

I was the middle child.

My parents came to America from the Dominican Republic, became citizens, and started their family. We lived in Inwood, Manhattan, but where I'm from, everybody knows it as Dyckman.

New Choppa · September 2017 — filmed on MYCUL’s block in Inwood.New Choppa

We grew up poor.

But we had love. My mother was an amazing mother—kind, caring, and always there for us.

My father loved us too, but he struggled with drug addiction, and that caused a lot of problems growing up. So from the beginning, life wasn't exactly simple.

But some of the things that would shape me the most hadn't happened yet.

Childhood photograph of MYCUL: a boy in a plaid flannel shirt, making a peace sign, in front of a white lace-covered chair. — From the archive

THE CLASSROOM

Fifth and sixth grade changed me.

I had a teacher who, from my perspective as that kid sitting in her classroom, psychologically tortured me.

And when I say that, I'm not talking about a teacher being strict.

Some of the things she did were so bizarre that even as a kid, I knew no adult should be treating a child that way.

One thing I'll never forget:

She put me in the middle of the classroom.

Around me were about 30 kids—my classmates, my friends.

She had them make a circle around me.

Then she had every one of them say one bad thing about me.

One after another.

And I took it.

That's what bothers me when I think about that kid.

I never defended myself.

This went on for roughly two years.

Eventually, she wanted to put me in special education. But before that could happen, I had to be evaluated.

So I went to Presbyterian Hospital.

I sat with a psychologist or psychiatrist—I don't remember which title it was—and I told them what had been happening to me at school.

I wasn't crying.

The person evaluating me was.

My story made this professional cry.

They told me that none of what was happening was my fault and that they were going to take care of it.

Within the next few days, my teacher disappeared.

No announcement that I remember.

No explanation.

She was just gone.

And finally, I had room to breathe.

But something had already changed inside me.

Photograph of MYCUL as a boy in a red polo shirt, standing behind a table with a white tablecloth and cakes, among other people whose faces are blurred. — From the archive

NEVER AGAIN

When she was gone, I started thinking about everything that had happened.

And I realized:

I never stood up for myself.

Not once.

I think something inside me decided right there:

Never again.

The problem is that I went way too far in the opposite direction.

I became defensive about everything.

If somebody did something to me—anything—I could completely overreact.

It was almost like I was constantly looking for another opportunity to prove that this time, I would defend myself.

Maybe I was trying to make up for all those times when I didn't.

And that created a lot of problems in my life.

A lot.

EPISODES

I used to call them episodes.

At least once or twice a week, something major seemed to happen with somebody.

I wasn't good with people.

I got into fights.

Arguments became bigger than they needed to become.

Disrespect—or sometimes what I perceived as disrespect—could become something enormous.

I was arrested around 36 different times.

Nothing that ever kept me incarcerated for years. Somehow, despite being arrested all those times, I never spent more than about 24 hours in a precinct.

But I did a lot of stupid things.

I spit on police.

I fought.

I got myself into situations that could have ended very differently.

And eventually I was reaching a point where there weren't many endings left.

I was going to get killed.

I was going to go to jail for a long time.

Or I was going to kill somebody and then go to jail.

And knowing who I was back then, the last possibility scared me more because I knew how extreme I could become.

Something had to change.

WORDS

Words always came naturally to me.

I was good at communicating. I knew how to talk to people, how to connect with them, and how to get my point across.

I had a certain charm, but I also had this natural enthusiasm. When I got excited about something, I got genuinely excited—almost like a kid. I'd light up talking about it, and that excitement could be contagious.

When I believed in something, people could feel it.

At the same time, there was another side of me.

I've always been extremely competitive.

Whatever I do, I want to win.

And I have this ability to obsess over something without even trying to obsess over it.

I don't need somebody to motivate me.

When something gets into my head, the focus comes naturally. I become completely laser focused without even trying.

I want to understand it.

Master it.

And, if I'm being completely truthful, part of me always wanted to impress people with my wit and intelligence.

Coming from where I came from, people didn't necessarily expect that from you.

Rap gave me somewhere to show it.

It started with freestyling.

Somebody would throw on a beat and the challenge was simple:

Can you rhyme right now?

Nothing written.

Nothing prepared.

Just think.

And I was really good at it.

Then I started writing.

That's when music became something completely different.

Freestyles in the Vault

Freestyles from MYCUL’s channel.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?

My life had no direction.

I'd get jobs—good-paying, respectable jobs that most people would've been happy to have—and something inside me would say:

Just get out.

Leave right now.

This isn't for you.

An hour.

A day.

A week.

Sometimes that was all it took.

And I'd leave.

I couldn't understand myself.

I remember wondering:

What's wrong with me?

Am I going to be a bum?

Am I going to live with my parents forever?

I was angry.

I was sad.

And writing became an escape.

I'd sit down and just write these long verses.

A verse handwritten in black ink on a sheet of lined, spiral-bound notebook paper, beginning “I used to want to get it anyway I could.” — From the archive · A verse, as writtenView full size

Everything that was happening inside my head finally had somewhere to go.

Music became therapy before I ever thought of it as a career.

Then somebody heard what I was doing and told me:

"Man, you're really good. You should professionally record."

So I did.

I started making actual songs.

And when I heard them?

I thought they were beautiful.

Cheerios · July 13, 2017 — the earliest upload on MYCUL’s YouTube channel.Cheerios

For the first time I started thinking:

Wow. Maybe I can really do this.

MASTERPIECE OF CAKE

That's how MasterPiece of Cake happened.

Even the title was a punchline.

Masterpiece because that's what I believed I was creating.

The advanced rhyming. The wordplay. Melodies. Punchlines. Metaphors. Potent lyrics.

And most importantly:

It was true.

I never wanted to make songs about drugs, women, cars and clothes just because that's what people expected a rapper to talk about.

That stuff wasn't important to me.

Then there was the other half of the title:

Piece of cake.

Because somehow, something so complicated came naturally to me.

So:

MasterPiece of Cake.

The name itself was wordplay.

Black-and-white portrait of MYCUL in a hooded black leather jacket, looking straight into the camera against a white background. — From the archive

I PAID FOR MY ALBUM WITH WEED

Here's where the story gets ridiculous.

I was recording in Brooklyn.

Around this time, I had lent somebody money.

He could never seem to pay me back in money.

But he always had marijuana.

After about four months, I finally said:

Whatever. Give me the weed.

I sold it.

And somehow that turned into a business.

For about 18 months, I sold marijuana.

And because I'm me, I got really good at it.

But I never wanted that to be my life.

Ironically, it helped finance the thing I actually loved.

Sometimes I would give my engineer marijuana to record me.

Money from selling marijuana bought beats.

So yes:

I paid for my first album with weed.

Yet I still didn't want to make music glorifying that life.

That wasn't what the music was about.

THE HOUSE AND THE ALBUM

Around the same time I finished my album, I did something else that changed my life.

I bought my first house.

Pennsylvania.

About an hour and twenty minutes away from Manhattan.

I had saved enough money to get out.

And getting out was probably one of the best decisions I ever made.

The problem was that I did two expensive things at basically the same time.

I bought a house.

And I made an album.

I spent real money making the music sound right.

Beats.

Recording.

Production.

Then when it came time to market it?

Nothing.

I had spent the money.

Looking back, it was completely backwards.

I thought the hard part was making something great.

I didn't understand that making something great and getting people to know it exists are two completely different things.

A green two-storey house with a white deck and stairs, in a snow-covered yard among bare trees, under a pink evening sky. — From the archive

HOT 97

The crazy thing is, during that first run, I actually had momentum.

In my neighborhood, I became somewhat of a legend.

Part of that came from my skill.

Part of it came from my notoriety.

People thought I was going to make it.

And then something happened that was a dream for any New York kid trying to make music:

My music was played on Hot 97.

Not once.

Three separate times.

Hot. 97.

For me, that was huge.

I was naive enough back then to think talent was basically the whole equation.

I thought:

Somebody is going to hear how good I am and sign me.

That's not how the business works.

Eventually I learned that record labels aren't simply searching the world for the technically best rapper.

They want attention.

Fans.

Momentum.

Revenue.

Something already moving.

And right when I had momentum, my life was forcing me in another direction.

From the archive · April 5, 2018 — Hot 97’s Hip Hop Mike interviews MYCUL for Hot 97 × XXL. A separate moment from the airplays.Hot 97 × XXL: Hip Hop Mike interviews Mycul

I HAD TO LEAVE

New York wasn't good for me anymore.

Too many episodes.

Too many people.

Too many situations.

I wasn't going to make it there freely.

That's the important word.

Freely.

Because if I stayed on the trajectory I was on, eventually one of those situations wasn't going to end with me spending a few hours in a precinct.

So I left.

Pennsylvania gave me distance from all of it.

But leaving New York also meant leaving the momentum MYCUL had built.

At the time, I didn't fully understand what that would cost.

Wooded hills in autumn colour on both sides of a wide river, with a highway bridge in the distance under a cloudy blue sky. — From the archive

$9.50 AN HOUR

I stopped selling weed after I bought my house and paid for the album.

I had maybe $30,000 left.

I lived off it for roughly a year.

Then reality showed up.

I needed a job.

I was offered a position managing a ski resort.

The pay?

$9.50 an hour.

I declined.

I went on Craigslist and found an in-home sales job.

That random Craigslist ad completely changed my life.

THE OBSESSION MOVED

Sales gave my brain another game to play.

Competition.

Psychology.

Communication.

Strategy.

Reading people.

Figuring out what works.

Becoming better.

Winning.

Everything in me that could obsess over constructing a rhyme could obsess over constructing a conversation.

And I went crazy with it.

In 2018, I became Rookie of the Year.

I reached #1.

Photograph of a printed sales spreadsheet with a row for each week — issued, demos, sales, total volume, close percentage — ending in a row of 2018 totals. — From the archive · Weekly sales record · 2018 totals, as printedView full size

The company average close rate was around 45%.

Mine was around 80%.

I was closing almost twice the company average because I attacked sales the same way I attacked everything else I cared about.

I wanted to be the best.

Before this, I had been trying to find a job where I could make maybe $500 a week.

Then I started making:

$5,000 a week.

Eventually there were months where I was making:

$25,000.

$35,000.

And something happened to my brain.

I became spoiled.

Eventually, making $4,000 in a week felt low.

Think about that.

The same guy wondering whether he was going to be a bum living with his parents was disappointed by a $4,000 week.

I THOUGHT I LOVED MY JOB

For years I told myself:

Finally.

I finally found something I love.

I finally found something I can stick with.

But eventually I realized something.

I didn't love my job.

I loved the money.

And once I understood that, a lot started making sense.

I had simply moved my obsession.

Music became money.

And I got really good at money.

THINGS

I bought another house.

But this one meant something different.

Growing up in the hood, everybody talks about making it out one day. You dream about getting some money, buying a house somewhere better, and getting your family out too. Your mother, your father, your brothers—the people who were there with you before any of it happened.

I actually got to do it.

I moved my parents and my brothers out of the neighborhood and into the second house I bought. It wasn't just that my own life had changed anymore. I had reached a point where I could change the circumstances of the people I loved too.

For all the things I was chasing back then, that one meant something.

I didn't just make it out. I was able to bring my family with me.

Then I bought another.

Then land.

Then another house.

I made around $180,000 on my first house.

I still own my second.

I made around $220,000 on my third.

I bought land for around $200,000 that I now believe is worth around a million.

I bought jewelry.

At one point I owned 20 firearms.

I had things.

A lot of the things that the younger version of me would have considered proof that I'd made it.

But eventually things stop being exciting.

Money stops producing the same feeling.

You hit another number.

Then what?

THE $10 MILLION PROMISE

At one point, my success even got me recruited across the country.

I received an email from a company.

The person behind it told me he'd spent two years looking for the right person.

He wanted somebody who understood a particular home-improvement product and business at an expert level.

He found me.

The company paid to move me to California.

I went.

The opportunity, as it had been presented to me, could have been worth around $10 million over five years.

I was helping them build something from scratch using everything I knew.

Five months later, I hadn't been paid a penny.

I came to believe that what they really wanted was the information in my head.

So I sued them for roughly $750,000.

The company eventually went bankrupt and shut down.

Even after you've "made it," life can still punch you directly in the face.

ONE BEAT

Years passed.

I worked.

I obsessed over money.

I built.

And eventually—

I got bored.

I'd accomplished so many of the things I thought I wanted.

And one day, I heard a beat.

That's it.

One beat.

And something inside me switched back on.

I wanted to write.

After years away, MYCUL came back.

182021

ONE SONG EVERY WEEK

I started recording again.

And I went hard.

Of course I did.

That's how I do everything.

I started dropping roughly one song every week.

The music was still there.

The wordplay was there.

The melodies were there.

I believed I was as good as I'd ever been.

There was only one problem.

People didn't seem to care anymore.

THE MUSIC WAITED FOR ME

The first time around, I had momentum.

People knew me.

People expected something to happen.

My music had played on Hot 97 three separate times.

Then I disappeared.

Years later, I came back expecting the quality of the music to matter the same way.

But attention doesn't wait around for you.

I had stopped.

The world hadn't.

And there was an irony I couldn't ignore.

The first time around:

I had attention and no money.

The second time around:

I had money and no attention.

The music waited for me.

The audience didn't.

202024

SCREW IT

Eventually I stopped dropping every week.

And basically said:

Screw it. I'll just drop an album.

That album became:

IT'S ALL A DREAM.

And once again, I didn't put marketing behind it.

But this time it wasn't because I was broke.

It was because I had finally understood something about myself.

I don't need music to save me.

I already made it out.

I don't necessarily even want to be a rapper.

I don't need to beg strangers to pay attention to me.

Music was therapy before it was anything else.

It still is.

I just happen to be really good at it.

IT'S ALL A DREAM

The title isn't really about music.

It's about my life.

Sometimes I look at everything that has happened and wonder if I'm even awake.

I believe I've manifested so much of my life from things that began as thoughts.

Who knew I could talk for a living and make thousands of dollars a day?

Who knew I'd own houses?

Land?

Who knew somebody across the country would spend years looking for somebody with a particular skill and eventually find me?

Life can become a beautiful dream.

It can also become a nightmare.

I've experienced pieces of both.

But I've never wanted to spend my life playing the victim.

Whatever happened to me, eventually I had to decide what I was going to do with it.

That's what It's All a Dream means to me.

MYCUL rapping into a microphone under purple light, one hand raised and pointing upward. — From the archive

222021

THE CURSE AND THE GIFT

There was still something I had never really dealt with.

That classroom.

That teacher.

That kid standing in the middle of all those other kids.

Eventually I wrote about it.

Really wrote about it.

The song became:

THE CURSE AND THE GIFT.

That song was hard.

I cried recording it.

All of that pain I'd carried around for years was finally coming out through the thing that had always been therapy for me in the first place.

Music.

About twenty years after everything happened, I found my old teacher's information.

And I reached out to her.

I sent her the song.

Then something happened that I wasn't expecting.

I didn't hate her anymore.

I don't even know how else to explain it.

For all those years, I carried that.

Then I made it into a song.

I sent it back to the person it was about.

And somehow—

I let it go.

LOVE

For as long as I can remember talking to girls, I was actually looking for a girlfriend.

I knew exactly what I wanted.

Someone sweet.

Innocent.

Pure.

Kind.

Genuine.

Beautiful, yes—but more importantly:

a heart of gold.

I met plenty of women.

None of them seemed to have exactly what I was looking for.

And then, because life apparently has a sense of humor, I met my wife because I was being a dirtbag.

There was another girl I'd had a crush on for a long time.

Eventually I decided she wasn't the kind of woman I thought she was.

So in my infinite maturity, I basically thought:

You know what? I'm going to sleep with one of your friends.

I started reaching out to her friends on Instagram and Facebook.

A couple responded.

One of them looked familiar.

Then I realized why.

The original girl had taken me to her prom.

And at that prom, there was another girl.

We had locked eyes.

This was her.

A stupid decision somehow put me in contact with the woman I'd spend my life with.

We were together for about seven years before we got married.

Life is weird.

FATHER

Then I became a father.

First my son.

Then three daughters.

And fatherhood changed the math.

Before my children, I had been obsessed with friends.

I'd risked my freedom for friends.

I'd risked my life.

I'd gotten into extremely dangerous situations—including situations involving shootings—because of friends.

And eventually I realized:

None of that was worth it.

Now I had children.

They needed me.

Not dead.

Not sitting in prison because I couldn't walk away from something.

Here.

Three children seen from behind, sitting side by side on a wooden bench, looking out over a lawn and evergreen trees at sunset. — From the archive

THE CYCLE

My son was around three years old.

I remember telling him:

If another kid gets in your face—

punch him right in the nose.

And then something inside me stopped.

What the hell are you teaching him?

I looked around.

We're not in New York anymore.

My son isn't growing up with people above him, below him, to the left, to the right, in front of him, behind him.

We're surrounded by nature.

Trees.

Space.

Beauty.

Quiet.

And I realized:

I was teaching my three-year-old son how to survive my childhood.

He wasn't living my childhood.

I was about to hand him something that had caused me problems for most of my life.

HOW DO I FILTER THE BAD OUT OF ME?

I talked to my friend.

I basically asked him:

How do I filter the bad out of myself?

I know I have flaws.

I know what some of those flaws have cost me.

How do I stop myself from giving them to my son?

My friend told me:

Read Proverbs.

So I did.

And Proverbs changed my life.

I started reading the Bible.

Eventually it became something we did every day.

People always say raising children doesn't come with a manual.

For me, I realized:

The manual already exists.

The Bible gave me wisdom I didn't have.

And now one of the things I'm proudest of isn't a house.

It isn't money.

It isn't being #1 in sales.

It's watching the wisdom develop in my children.

I'M STILL WORKING ON ME

None of this means I suddenly became perfect.

Far from it.

Relationships are still one of the places where I've caused the most damage.

If I'm being truthful, I've probably ruined 99.9% of the relationships I've ever had.

Even my best friend and I stopped speaking.

Thankfully, we speak again now.

That defensive kid is still inside me.

I'm still trying to change parts of myself that were built a long time ago.

The difference is:

now I can see them.

28Latest chapter

NOW

So who am I now?

MYCUL in a white hoodie and black sweatsuit, standing in snowy woods and smiling back at the camera as he fixes a yellow POSTED sign to a tree, holding more signs in his other hand. — From the archive

I'm still competitive.

Still obsessive.

Still dreaming ridiculously big.

I want a thousand acres.

For myself.

Aerial view of open grassland with a winding creek, a gravel road and a small group of buildings, stretching to distant hills under a blue sky. — From the archive

I want houses in three different countries so my family and I can move around.

I'm building businesses.

I'm working remotely.

I'm making money from my house.

But somewhere along the way, my definition of success changed.

I used to want money.

Then I got money.

I wanted houses.

I got houses.

I wanted land.

I got land.

I wanted things.

I got things.

And eventually I realized the thing I actually want more of is something nobody can manufacture.

TIME.

Time with my wife.

Time with my son.

Time with my daughters.

Time to watch them become whoever they're going to become.

I want to build businesses that allow me to stay home with them instead of building a life that requires me to constantly leave them.

I still want the thousand acres.

I still want the houses around the world.

I'm still going to chase enormous goals because that's who I am.

But I'm not trying to escape my life anymore.

I'M TRYING TO MAKE SURE I'M ACTUALLY THERE TO LIVE IT.

And maybe that's the craziest part of the whole story.

The kid who once wondered—