Snoop Dogg spent nine months on Tha Blue Carpet Treatment, and on November 21, 2006, the Long Beach rapper’s eighth studio album hit stores with Dr. Dre back on the boards for the first time in six years. Twenty years later, it still reads like a reunion record that refused to coast.
The numbers were loud from day one. The Doggystyle/Geffen release opened at No. 5 on the US albums chart with 264,000 copies in its first week, and by the close of 2006 it had sold 637,000 copies, even though it had been in stores for barely six weeks of that year.
Dre returns, and the guest list explodes
Dre had not produced a Snoop track since 2000. On this album he produced several cuts, including “Boss’ Life” and “Round Here,” and he also rapped a verse on “Imagine,” a slow burner with D’Angelo that was first meant for a Busta Rhymes album before a sample clearance stalled it.
Around Dre sat an all-star production bench: The Neptunes on “Vato” with B-Real, Timbaland and Danja on “Get a Light” with Damian Marley, plus DJ Battlecat, DJ Pooh, Terrace Martin and Mr. Porter. The guest list ran from George Clinton on the opening “Intrology” to Stevie Wonder, who sings and co-produces the closing track, “Conversations.”
Snoop framed the project as a homecoming. “I took it back to the basics,” he said at the time, adding that he had been making pop and R&B songs and was now “feeling like going right back to the ‘hood.”
The Akon connection and the posse cut
The album shared a single with another November 2006 release. “I Wanna Love You,” produced by Akon, appeared on both this record and Akon’s six-times-Platinum album Konvicted, which landed one week earlier. The same month brought The Game’s Doctor’s Advocate, and The Game turns up here as a guest too, making late 2006 a crowded season for West Coast rap.
Then there is “Candy,” the Rick Rock-produced posse track that brings in E-40, MC Eiht, Goldie Loc, Daz Dillinger and Kurupt. It runs on a Digable Planets sample and a nod to Cameo, and it was released as a single in December 2006.
A 20-year scorecard
Here is how the album stacks up against the record Snoop made exactly ten years earlier, which Badiyaa revisited when Tha Doggfather turned 30:
- Tha Doggfather (1996): opened at No. 1 with 479,000 copies.
- Tha Blue Carpet Treatment (2006): opened at No. 5 with 264,000 copies, about 55 percent of the earlier debut.
- Running time: 21 tracks and 77 minutes 50 seconds, one of the longest albums in his catalog.
Lower opening, longer legs: the album reached 903,000 US copies by June 2018 and holds a Gold certification from the RIAA, plus Gold in Canada and France and Platinum in Denmark.
How it was received
Critics mostly agreed it was a return to form, with a Metacritic average of 70. Several reviewers compared it favorably with his debut, and Snoop himself counts it among his favorite albums. The title is a play on the red carpet laid out at formal events, swapped for his trademark blue.
The album arrives at 20 on Saturday, November 21, 2026.
Further reading
Image: Remy Golinelli, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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