Photo: MICHAEL TRAN / AFP / Getty Images
Howard University is bringing Cardi B into the classroom as a case study in how music, branding, and culture move together in real time.
The university’s Warner Music/Blavatnik Center for Music Business announced a new course for the Fall 2026 semester titled “The Cardi B: Am I The Drama? The Art, Production, Marketing and Cultural Impact.”
According to the center’s official Instagram posts, the class is a three-credit interdisciplinary seminar that will examine hip-hop “as both a cultural movement and a professional enterprise” through the lens of Cardi B and the rollout of her album Am I The Drama?
The course is tied to Howard’s Hip Hop Studies minor, which the university says is designed to connect students to careers in academia, media, the arts and the music industry. Howard’s official program description says the minor blends cultural study with hands-on experience in areas like audio production, entrepreneurship and media.
That context matters because Howard is not just teaching Cardi B as a celebrity. The course is being framed as a study of how an artist’s work moves through multiple lanes at once: music, marketing, visual storytelling, live performance, gender politics and cultural influence. Official materials for the class say students will analyze the album campaign behind Am I The Drama? and how it functioned as both a creative project and a business rollout.
Howard’s Warner Music/Blavatnik Center has already positioned itself as a bridge between the classroom and the business. The center’s official pages describe a program built around mentorship, specialized coursework and direct exposure to music-industry leadership. In that sense, a class built around Cardi B’s rollout fits the mission: teach students using a current artist whose career offers lessons in marketing, audience building and cultural visibility.
The album at the center of the course also had the kind of commercial impact that makes it easy to study as a business case. Coverage cited Howard’s announcement as describing Am I The Drama? as a campaign that moved more than 200,000 units in its first week and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
Registration for the course is now open for Howard students ahead of the Fall 2026 semester, according to the Warner Music/Blavatnik Center’s official posts.
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