‘Glee’ Cast—Now With Charice!—Performs “Telephone” And “Empire State Of Mind”

We wanted to see a lot of changes made on this season of Glee, and sadly, none of them happened in “Audition”, the first episode of Season 2. Not like Fox is weeping into their jazz hands—last night’s episode scored huge ratings, 20% up from last season’s premiere. Toast your slushie into the air, Gleeks!

Out of all the songs performed on Glee last night, head below for the two most irrelevant to the plot: the cast singing “Empire State Of Mind” and Lea Michele sharing a fiery duet with Oprah-approved Charice on “Telephone”.

This musical number might be more impressive live on stage with no regard to a main narrative, but on last night’s episode, it just came off as time filler. (Mr. Schue announces that Nationals are in New York, so they sing about… New York, referencing names and places they probably didn’t even know existed if Jay-Z didn’t include them in his raps.)

Also, these are the whitest, lamest kids in the whole school, and as much as we still love them, none of them—especially Artie—can pull off a line like “I’ll be hood forever.” No. No you won’t. You won’t even be hood once, not even for the duration of this song.

“Empire State Of Mind”

Now here’s Lea Michele and Glee newbie Charice singing “Telephone” pretty much for no reason other than to start a diva feud between Rachel Berry and her All About Eve-esque nemesis, Sunshine Corazon. They could have picked any song for these two to sing, and if you really wanted to show off your vocals to ignite some jealousy in a competitor, wouldn’t you pick a Broadway standard, or maybe a Christina Aguilera song? Not a tune pretty much any tone-deaf person can sing? (And despite that fact, the producers still felt the need to add copious amounts of Auto-Tune anyway. Or maybe that’s just the acoustics of McKinley High’s bathrooms?)

“Telephone”

Can we give Jane Lynch another Emmy just for her delivery of “shut up”? We hope this is the clip they use when she inevitably gets nominated for a golden guy yet again next year.

Watch the whole Season 2 premiere over at Hulu. And get ready for next week’s Britney Spears episode!