dan the automator's projects (dr octagon & deltron) sells plenty of instrumental versions of his rap projects.
roll deep is another rap or grime or whatever group that has beats that would work as instrumentals as well as rhyming over.
its fairly lazy to denounce all rap beats as meaningless which lack complexity. i'd agree rap isn't necessarily original music, but its ability to manipulate previously released work into a workable track which is completely different than its original source is art. beautiful art. they set the atmospherics for the album, enhance the concept or whichever. the rza's wu tang beats from 93-96 turned him into a revered producer outside of rap. liam howlett jacked their style on a few fat of the land tracks. further, he applied his "electronica beats" into a rap track for kool keith...something which was done on the aformentioned dr octagon album.
i look at rap beats in the same ilk as house or whichever form of dance music an artist is. is dj shadow garbage?
and we don't even need to get started on the roots, who are sorta overated, but they certainly do not further this youngsters viewpoint on rap.
edit: i just read some more of this dudes argument.
julliard? fuck julliard. miles davis went to julliard for a year & quit - deciding instead to learn from the master's charlie parker & diz. none of those guys ever had professional teachings. music that is natural without the pretense of having "musical teaching" & expectations of what music IS usually yields much more successful results. miles davis QUIT julliard - did not have any teaching - and he understood music perhaps better than anyone. lyrically, without lyrics, he had the ability to convey a sense of emotion or feeling that allowed the listener to make its own interpretations. rap music beats, however they are made, are generally made to profess a sense of emotion. who cares if they are manipulated or engineered in a falsfied manner? miles davis, who is a musical genius, cut & pasted all of his electric albums from different sessions or tracks into a studio album track. is he less of a genius? miles davis looped beats into 1972 with on the corner? does he no longer have musical talent? miles davis is music.