Whether the Smithsonian will get jiggy is an open question, but it has launched a new initiative to research hip-hop, the once outlaw street music that over three decades has grown into the driving force behind a multibillion-dollar entertainment and fashion industry.

The National Museum of American History announced the artifact-collecting effort at a February event in New York City attended by such luminaries as Russell Simmons, rapper Ice-T, break dancer Crazy Legs and hip-hop founders Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. Among the first donated items were a vintage boombox from Fab 5 Freddy (host of the bygone “Yo! MTV Raps”), a turntable from Flash and two graffitied jackets from Bambaataa.

The announcement has prompted jokes – the satirical newspaper The Onion wondered if the museum’s exhibit will include a “nine-room wing displaying bullets removed from two decades of rappers” – as well as earnest debate.

“There’s going to be a lot of arguing over the collection over time,” Nelson George, author of the 1999 book “Hip Hop America” tells Smithsonian magazine, “because there are all these agendas about what hip-hop is, what represents hip-hop, and a regional component as well. This is the beginning of a long dialogue.”

Hip-hop’s detractors say they worry about enshrining gangsta rap, which often glamorizes violence and crime and denigrates women.

Curator Marvette Perez, who is spearheading the project, says the initiative must indeed address the cruder side of hip-hop. George and others agree that a full treatment is warranted. “If you’re going to do hip-hop, you’ve got to do hip-hop,” he says, arguing that its history shouldn’t be sanitized.

“It’s important, not because it’s fun all the time but because it embodies all the challenges of African-American youth culture.”

The initiative, called “Hip-Hop Won’t Stop: The Beat, the Rhymes, the Life,” was suggested by former LaFace Records CEO Mark Shimmel, now of Mark Shimmel Music, who says it’s “the only idea I’ve ever heard that everybody loved.”

Perez says hip-hop has been “a lot more influential than I actually ever thought, in terms of people’s memories.”

Hip-hop veterans welcome the scholarly interest. “We started it, and it continues through ups and downs,” says Kool Herc, who declines to give his age. “But the boundaries hip-hop crossed over to bring all these cultures together, that never happened before. Young kids can relate to their parents right now. Kids born into hip-hop don’t have no color. That never happened until now.”

Simmons, 48, who cofounded the label Def Jam Records, says the exposure will teach the next generation that its sound, which a lot of younger listeners might associate with commercial efforts to market cars and clothes, has a profound history of social protest.

For that matter, some observers say a hip-hop exhibition might help the museum’s street cred.

Says Benjamin Chavis, former chief executive for the NAACP and now the CEO of Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network: “I predict more than the normal long lines of young people flocking to the Smithsonian.”