On the odd occasion he rolls into town, Andrew Koji Shiraki (Koji) spends most of his time at Little Amps on Green Street in Harrisburg or the Climbnasium in Mechanicsburg. A coffee shop seemed more conducive to steady eye contact, so here we sit, beside the giant red roaster.
I ask Koji to “tweet” me his bio face-to-face: “Artist and activist, born and raised in Harrisburg, who works out of Philadelphia but spends most of the year traveling for music.” He’ll avidly tell me later that people can’t be neatly packaged into 140 characters.
In his army-green pullover, tall collar and wide Ray-Ban glasses that nearly match his almost-black goatee, Koji, 26, explains his history with the DIY (“do it yourself”) ethic. As a kid, he made punk rock zines (small circulation, self-published magazines), organized a fourth grade petition to change the dress code punishment at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School, and set up his first music show at age 12. Later, as a teenager, he attended punk shows in D.C., New York and Boston, which gave him a feel for DIY punk subculture movements, such as riot grrrl, which addressed feminist issues starting in the early ’90s.
Today, Koji tours around the world doing music he hesitates to classify. “I can’t pare it down to a genre,” he says. “Call it punk, call it indie, call it folk. I think what it comes down to is that I make ‘people music.'”
As ambiguous as that sounds, most of Koji’s lyrics are based on improvisation—there’s no real formula to his writing—and his influences are sundry. He tries to be “as soulful as Otis Redding, as hard and as vast as The Clash, as direct and artful as my favorite rap records,” he explains. “And I want to make a statement like Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan.”
Koji’s rhetoric is so smooth that it’s easy to forget the diverse paths he’s traveled to get to where he is now. In high school, Koji helped start the Lower Paxton Youth Center, which organized poetry readings, music nights, visual art shows and food pantry collections. For a brief time after high school, he attended Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art. At 18, he dropped out to join a band, but left shortly after due to a messy contract clash with the record label. For a couple of years, Koji attended Harrisburg Area Community College. He left HACC before graduating and decided to settle back into Harrisburg temporarily, still disillusioned with the music industry, he says.
During that period, Koji officially founded COLORMAKE, a Harrisburg-based arts and activism collective/screen printing shop/studio space that coordinated music and gallery shows, skate and bike jams, political demonstrations and more—think Lower Paxton Youth Center for young adults. Its headquarters was a warehouse on S. 10th Street, which closed after a four-year run following a blowout Halloween party. Still, COLORMAKE remains an online destination for artists and activists worldwide. Its Facebook page has more than 2,000 likes and its Tumblr page chronicles Koji’s latest jaunts. Currently, COLORMAKE is undergoing a makeover and is set to relaunch soon, so keep your cursor on the refresh button.
While managing the collective, Koji continued to write music and play guitar. In 2010, around when the warehouse was on its way out, Koji said to himself, “Forget it. I’m just going to go on tour.” (The “it” refers to his lingering disdain for the music business, not COLORMAKE). “So I put my head down and went on tour. Before the end of it, someone [Run For Cover Records] hit me up and said, ‘We want to put out your record.'”
Koji says he initially lied to his parents about how little money he made and about sifting through dumpster trash for food. Most of the cash he did make flowed into his gas tank. “Now I do tours that are [more than] two months long, 70 shows in 74 days,” he says.
In January, he will have just wrapped up a multi-country European tour with Into It Over It and Slingshot Dakota. But he’s already eager to play a homecoming holiday show when he gets back, his first Harrisburg performance in more than two years.
Despite having completed a handful of U.K. tours, Koji tells me that his favorite place to play is Michigan. “When I’m singing there, I look at people that are frustrated because they [outsiders] define Detroit by the decay and statistics, just like Harrisburg and Philly,” he explains. “It shakes me emotionally. It’s an underdog place. We have the same chip on our shoulder, the same unbreakable spirit.”
This compassion for others is what has inspired Koji to keep art and activism together. In addition to COLORMAKE, he’s worked with larger humanitarian projects, including Resolve and Invisible Children on the issue of child soldiers in Uganda, the Congo and Sudan. He also speaks and performs at universities, children’s hospitals and inner-city youth programs on topics ranging from international politics and lobbying to the music industry.
Above all, Koji says he wants kids to know that their voices matter. Just being able to engage in dialogue—to inspire young people to speak and stand up for social and political change—is a step in the right direction, he says. He excitedly adds that art has the power to open up this dialogue.
It’s clear that whatever paths present themselves in the future, Koji will continue to merge his advocacy with his music. And he encourages others to be equally proactive. “People really take for granted the gravity of what it takes to just live a life of intention,” he says, stretching down his goatee. “Whether you’re writing or making art or starting a small business or trying to be an excellent son or daughter, [strive] to not be passive—to really have a direction or trajectory.”
“I think maybe that’s what my art serves to represent.”
