I'm gonna revive this thread. Shocker, maybe, ehh
MJs voice as a child was flawless. Absolutely flawless. It's actually incredible how good he was. Literally his first songs, the first songs we essentially heard him doing this, is essentially perfect and he didn't have to change a NAM THING. And you can't GET ENOUGH OF IT.
Even before I Want You Back, a song like Big Boy, Wow. An 8 year old child. Precocious and yet fully possessed of all that talent. Truly staggering.
And then you hear him branching out, doing other things, it's just as impressive.
Like, this sounds so good. So good.
So really, it's kinda just, logical, sad to say, that he had peaked so early that it was just inevitable it'd go down. It really didn't though, he had just changed so much by 40 that he was essentially a different artist. If he always sounded "recognizable", people would probably say he was always good. I prefer him changing, and vocally he knew exactly what he was doing still. But really, man, his voice was so special early on.
So my pick is his voice was it. But as a young man. As he got older, of course his dancing just improved by leaps and bounds, that is incredible in the exact same manner, just for different reasons.