The new Rolling Stone guide: Who’s up? Who’s down?

It doesn’t take much flipping through “The New Rolling Stone Album Guide” to notice what a difference a decade or two have made in this reference book first published in 1978.

The fourth edition of the guide is out -- “completely revised and updated” from the 1992 third edition, says the cover. At times, though, perceptive readers may feel they’ve stumbled across the Rolling Stone Guide from Superman’s Bizarro World, where everything is the opposite of life as we know it.

Moving up

Ice Cube: The rapper’s 1991 album “Death Certificate” was dismissed in the 1992 guide with 1 1/2 stars (“Cube’s pleas against social self-destruction are undone by the violent vehemence of his gangsta rap rhetoric”). In the new guide, it’s given four stars (out of a possible five): “The multiplatinum album found Cube growing more articulate even as he grew more vulgar.”

Donna Summer: The disco queen’s 1976 concept album “The Four Seasons of Love” was ranked one star in 1983 but gets 3 1/2 stars in the new guide (“one of the few albums that benefit from being heard whole”).

Moving down

Paul McCartney: The former Beatle’s second solo album, “Ram,” received four stars in the 1983 edition, slipped to 3 1/2 stars in 1992’s third edition and is down to three stars in the latest edition.

Wham!: The British bubblegum pop duo’s third and final album, “Music From the Edge of Heaven,” is demoted from three stars in the previous edition to one star this time around. Wham! indeed.

Moving in

Tenacious D.: The satirical duo of actor-musician Jack Black, right, and pal Kyle Gass lands in pop music Valhalla with its one and only album, 2001’s “Tenacious D.,” which rates 3 1/2 stars (“two sloppy dudes strumming and wailing the hysterically funny ‘70s faux-metal ballads that had made them legendary for their L.A. club gigs.”)

Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch: As a rapper, Mark Wahlberg and his crew earned 3 1/2 stars. Too bad that’s the total for their two albums. (“Mark appeared to be no more than an extended footnote in the New Kids on the Block story” -- until he launched a successful career as an actor.)

Moving out

Tom Jones: The Welsh singer was the embodiment of sexy in the ‘60s, renewed his hip factor in the ‘80s by collaborating with the Art of Noise, yet goes from a string of 2 1/2 - and 3-star albums in the 1992 guide to persona nonlisting this year.

Robert Johnson: The introduction to the new volume states, “[W]e’ve tried to limit the artists in this book to the people we think we’ll still be listening to when the fifth or sixth edition of the Guide comes out, or to the artists who ... have made a lasting, undeniable contribution to pop music.” Yet this titan of Delta blues is absent, while the Spice Girls’ oeuvre rates half a page of critical analysis.